“I have never been much taller than my cello,” Pablo Casals once
remarked. He spoke more modestly than he knew. For in the history of
music, Casal's cello stands very tall indeed. Most musicians would
agree that he was the greatest cellist ever to play that awkward
instrument. More than that, he was a humanist who refused to compromise
or adjust in an age of compromise and adjustment. “We are before
anything men,” he said, “and we have to take part in the circumstances
of life. Who indeed should be more concerned than the artist with the
defense of liberty and free inquiry, which are essential to his very
creativity?” Nobody before had played the cello the way Casals did. He spent hours on
a single phrase, days and weeks on a single movement, whole years on
the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, which he was the first
cellist ever to perform in their entirety. “People say I play as easily
as a bird sings. If they only knew how much effort their bird has put
into his song.” He may have worshiped the masters, but once onstage he
insisted on meeting them as an equal, employing powerhouse accents,
theatrical contrasts and a ruddy tone with an infinite variety of
shadings. Pablo's father was the church organist in the town of Vendrell some 40
miles from Barcelona, and the young Pablo grew up with music. He was
playing the piano at four, the violin at seven, the organ at nine. At
eleven he heard a cello for the first time when a traveling trio
visited Vendrell. “I felt as if I could not breathe. There was
something so tender, beautiful and human about the sound. A radiance
filled me.” After a good deal of family argument, little Pablo was marched off by
his mother to Barcelona, to study at the Municipal School of Music. In
those days, cellists were held in no high esteem. “Ordinarily, I
had as soon hear a bee buzzing in a stone jug,” wrote George
Bernard Shaw in 1894. It was Casals' destiny to change all that, and he
began early. At that time, student cellists were taught to bow with
their arms close to their sides, even holding a book under their
armpits as a method of instruction. Casals tried bowing more freely
and also began experimenting with the fingering of the left hand, which
in the old tradition used to zip up and down the finger board like a
yoyo. The changes may seem trivial, but these techniques
revolutionized both the playing of the cello and its stature as a solo
instrument. Few prodigies have had better luck.
At 16 he was introduced to Count Guillermo de Morphy, a patron of the
arts and adviser to Spain's Queen Maria Cristina. The count tutored
Casals in several languages and presented him to the Queen, who was an
enthusiastic pianist. Soon the Queen and the young cellist were
playing duets together. In 1899 Count de Morphy sent him to see the French conductor Charles
Lamoureux. Gruff, distracted, crippled, Lamoureux rose at the first
sounds from Casals' cello, limped toward the young artist, and embraced
him, saying: “You are one of the elect.” Casals was then 22,
and from then on, he had it made.
He played for Queen Victoria, the King and Queen of Portugal, and became
an intimate of Belgium's Queen Elisabeth .
