The Legend of Prades

"I've just been rehearsing with Casals," said Violinist Yehudi Menuhin. "He's in wonderful form, full of vigor and attack. He's taken off 15 pounds since his illness. Walks every morning--three kilometers--and rests in the afternoon." Recovered from a heart attack in Puerto Rico (TIME, April 29, 1957), Cellist Casals was back in the town of Prades (pop. 5,000) on the edge of the French Pyrenees, where he resumed his concert career eight years ago as an exile from Franco's Spain. From all over Western Europe musicians and disciples poured into town to play for and honor the rotund little man with the shiny bald head who is the hero of music's most lovingly cultivated modern legend.

At 81, Casals threw himself into the three-week Prades Festival with an enthusiasm that would tax the stamina of a far younger man. He scheduled himself to appear at least once in every one of the 13 concerts, playing eight sonatas (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) and the cello parts in six chamber music ensembles.

Passion in the Church. The concerts took place in the 17th century Saint-Pierre Church. There, beneath an improbable altarpiece of gilded cherubs and bare-breasted angels, Cellist Casals shuffled in from the vestry on short, hesitant feet, bearing a brown-grained viola da gamba by the pegs. When he motioned the audience to its seats with his bow, his movements were crabbed with age. But when he began to play, the vast, hollow church filled with luminous, lucid sound, suffused with a passion that is the wonder of musicians the world over. Each night the audience paid Casals the only tribute permitted in the church, rising to their feet and standing in hushed silence.

This year's Prades Festival was as ambitious as ever. But it seemed less festive than early festivals, perhaps because the image of Casals as a man who silenced his own great gifts for the political principle of antiFascism has grown hazy with time.

In rehearsals, where Menuhin turned up in cinnamon-colored shorts, the full spirit of dedication remained. "Bravo for the pizzicato!" Casals would cry, while through the door peered the Casals cultists: thick-spectacled German music masters, a pony tail from Paris, a pair of combs from Catalonia, a Fulbright scholar, a darkly gowned queen (Elisabeth of Belgium)--all hushed to silence in the presence of the eternal creative mystery.

God in the Street. With the Casals Festival scheduled as a yearly event in Puerto Rico, it seems unlikely that the master will ever again make music on such a grand scale in Prades. He no longer has a residence there, nor is he entirely welcome in the hamlet he made famous. This year his landlord jacked up the rent of the cottage he always occupied. And the cellist himself was a little difficult. "If M. Casals met God in the street," remarked a town official, "there is some doubt as to who would take precedence." Offered an apartment in nearby Molitg-les-Bains. Casals will spend part of his summers there with his handsome, 21-year-old bride (and fourth wife) Martita Montanez the rest of the year in Puerto Rico.

But the people of Prades are unlikely to forget the most distinguished of their adopted sons wherever he may be. Casals' former landlord has not yet removed from the walls of the cottage its widely famed label--"El Cant dels Ocells" (in Catalan, The Song of the Birds). It is the name of the popular folk air with which Cellist Casals, playing alone, will end this year's festival just as he ended all the others.

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