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.#
