A Man for All Reasons

"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 (she played violin to his cello).

After settling in Paris, he gathered round him a set of friends, disciples and assorted ladies. From 1906 to 1912 he lived with Portuguese Cellist Guilhermina Suggia. In 1914 he married an American singer named Susan Metcalfe, with whom he lived for 14 years.

Nobody was a more unlikely virtuoso. Stubby, growing bald even in his 20s, he lacked the flowing hair, the spatulated long fingers, the panache of the classical virtuoso--in fact, with his owlish eyes and rimless gold spectacles, he looked like a bank clerk. But he prospered and did his best for his homeland. He founded an orchestra for Barcelona and supported it until it became self-sustaining. Then Francisco Franco's seizure of power changed Casals' life. He played or conducted numberless concerts for the Loyalist cause. Eventually he moved to Prades, a French village across the border from Catalonia, where he endured World War II, doing what he could for the Spanish refugees.

At war's end, Casals began a triumphant tour of England. But after six months, he discovered that none of the victorious allies were going to do much of anything about Franco. In sorrow and disillusion, he announced that he would make no more commercial appearances "as long as my country is not free." He later said: "I knew that in a world where cynicism widely held sway, my action would hardly affect the course of the nations--it was, after all, only the action of a single individual. But how else could I act? One has to live with oneself."

For three years, Casals endured his silence. Then Violinist Alexander Schneider urged him to play and/or conduct in Prades itself to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Bach's death. Thus the Prades Festivals were born. They became both a rite and a homage to the musician and the man.

Sacred Idea. In 1956 he moved to Puerto Rico, the native land of his last wife, Martita. She had come to him in France as a pupil, and they fell in love. When they were married, she was 20, he was 80. Casals was aware of the incongruity of their ages. "A bridegroom is not usually 30 years older than his father-in-law," he noted wryly. But Martita fussed over him and dealt with visitors to their modest house on the outskirts of Rio Piedras, and accompanied him every year to Marlboro, Vt., where he conducted and held master classes.

At home, he rose at dawn, trudged a few hundred yards down the beach holding an umbrella over his head to shield his sensitive eyes from sunlight, then came back and played a Bach prelude or fugue on the piano as a "benediction on the house."

When he died last week at the age of 96, the world mourned the loss of a great musician. It also mourned the loss of a man of magnificent simplicity and integrity. "I am a man first, an artist second," he once said. "As a man, my first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow men. My contribution to world peace may be small. But at least I will have given all I can to an idea I hold sacred."

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