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OCTOBER 2004

Strings of Glory:
Pablo Casals To Be Honored at the 92nd Street Y

by Joan Baum, Ph.d.

Thirty one years to the month since he died in 1973 at the age of 97, the incomparable musician Pablo Casals will be back on the radar screen (he’s never been off for the professionals), when the 92nd Street Y presents Pablo Casals, Artist of Conscience: A Homage to the Great Cellist and Humanitarian. Not just a superb performer, interpreter, conductor, and composer, Casals (born Pau Carlos Salvador Defilló, in Spain) became, according to Jonathan Kramer, Associate Professor of Music at North Carolina State, the quintessential symbol of the artist whose life and work are dedicated to freedom, a “moral compass” for the last century and this one. Not even Picasso, whose Guernica has inspired millions, but whose private life was less than ideal, can come close to Casals, whose self-imposed exile from Franco’s Spain was underscored by defying fascism, even at the point of a gun, and whose personal life was at one with his humanitarianism. He was an outstanding musician, an innovative interpreter, composer, conductor, whose performances of Bach are, as Kramer says, “akin to Scripture.” How unfortunate that the legacy of “the father of modern cello” is somewhat forgotten today by the general public, though musicians, of course, have never lost their love for the Master. It was Casals who taught them how to bow, how to use their fingers —not like hammers in a piano—and how to use their arms—not keeping elbows near their sides, but moving freely. His pedagogy turned on the idea, the passionate belief, that music was not just notes on a page but an integration of body and soul, an “organism, not a mechanism,” as Kramer eloquently puts it. Casals’ reputation soared during a time when the authenticity movement bound many musicians in an iron clad way to the score. Enter Casals, who gave phrasing, rhythm, gesture, purpose a new meaning above and beyond cool perfectionism.

On Saturday, October 9th everyone will have a chance to hear what Casals was all about in a unique program put together by Prof. Kramer, a specialist in ethnic musicology, and his colleague, Julliard-trained Selma Gokcen, a professor of cello at the Guild Hall School in London, whose idea it was to put together a series of programs that would explore “through words, texts, and music” the “intellectual, artistic, cultural, and spiritual roots of Casals’ musical thought; and his contributions to the expressive potential of his instrument and the art of interpretation.”  Though neither Professor Kramer nor Professor Gokcen knew Casals, teachers with whom they both studied most certainly did know him and they conveyed to their students how much the cello was the instrument “closest” to him, the “voice” by which he would express his love of humanity, which he felt was “the purpose of art.” 

Though the myth that great artists are also great human beings was put to rest a long time ago (Wagner particularly comes to mind), exceptions do prove the rule. Pablo Casals, whose long life extended over two world wars (he played at the White House for Theodore Roosevelt in 1904!), the Great Depression, and the most totalitarian regimes the earth has ever seen, never once faltered in his words and deeds. “By telling his story again,” Prof. Kramer says—how timely the occasion—“we are calling on cellists, musicians, and artists to claim him as a kind of secular patron saint to serve as a model of the courage and decency with which we might infuse our own lives and careers.” When Casals died on October 22, just two days before United Nations Day, Franco was still in power, but a late composition, the 1971 Himno a las Naciones Unidas had already had its first performance, and three years after Casals’ death, King Juan Carlos I issued a commemorative postage stamp in his honor.#

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