Homage to Pablo Casals

In the prelude to Bach's third suite for unaccompanied cello, there's a moment when the intricate opening melodies flow into a series of broken chords. Each chord is played twice, with connecting passages of four notes each, and for some reason--I think maybe because the music is so simple--it seems as though there's an army of cellos waltzing together, or a chorus of very simple, ordinary people. The people might all know one another very well. Or they might just be strangers at the back of some coffeehouse, passing around bottles of wine or beer and joining in the choruses while someone recites the verses--that could be the melodies at the beginning, and maybe even the ecstatic double-stopped trill at the end--just because they all felt they'd enjoy singing together. The music reminds me of the scene at the end of Kubrick's Paths of Glory, where the doomed French soldiers chime in with a German girl's singing, or Matisse's dancing nudes, or a vision of primitive communism, or Melville's description of the Fiddler:

What was sad in the world he did not superficially gainsay; what was good in it he did not cynically slur; and all which was to him personally enjoyable, he gratefully took to his heart.

It even reminds me a little of George Orwell's description of revolutionary Spain's "feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom," where people could sing together as comrades. "In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves," Orwell wrote. "In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes." Throughout Catalonia, he said, "human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine."

Pablo Casals--who discovered the Bach cello suites, unplayed for 150 years, at the age of 13--grew up in the Catalonia Orwell later wrote about, and he remained a loyal Catalan right up to his death last week at the age of 96. Catalan "was the language of troubadours," he once said, "and of free spirits." He liked to quote a Catalan poet, Joan Maragall, who wrote: "To take flight to Heaven, we must stand on the firm soil of our native land." And he sometimes told about Luis Companys, president of Catalonia under the Spanish Republic. Casals had met him while conducting concerts for the Workingmen's Concert Association he'd organized and playing the cello at benefits for Loyalist Spain. After the fascists triumphed, Companys was executed. "When he faced the firing squad," Casals said, "Companys lit a cigarette and then he removed his shoes and socks. He wanted to die with his feet touching the soil of Catalonia." This was a pleasure Casals himself missed: he exiled himself from Spain after Franco's victory there, and for a long time he didn't play the cello in public.

Yet Casals was not a political artist; he cared little for ideology, and he refused to play in Soviet Russia as well as Fascist Spain. Casals was "fundamentally a Catalonian peasant," a Spanish refugee teaching at the University of Puerto Rico told Bernard Taper of the New Yorker in 1961. Like peasants elsewhere, Casals had a seemingly infinite capacity for endurance, and thinking of the reasons some Vietnamese peasants give for opposing American-backed dictators--those peasants who say they're interested not in politics but in peace, who are motivated not by ideology but just by hatred for torturers and love of their country and its people--may help us to understand him better.

Casals, then, was less an intellectual than a peasant--in politics and in music. When he was small, he learned to use his common sense. "In principle," his mother told him, "I do not respect the law." When his brother was called up by the Spanish army, Casals's mother told him: "You do not have to kill anybody, and nobody has to kill you. Go away...Leave the country." He went to Argentina.

"For me, Bach is like Shakespeare," Casals said many years later. "He is everything. Everything except a professor. Professor Bach I do not know." On Casals's records, the dances that make up the cello suites are genuinely dances, their beats strong and resonant like those of a country fiddler, their rhythms fluctuating slightly with the fluctuation of the dance. Politics and music for Casals were both ordinary activities for ordinary people, in which human beings behaved as human beings and not as cogs in a machine. Casals's popularity accordingly extended to peasants, musicians and politicians alike. His status as the world's greatest cellist was virtually unquestioned. But he was evidently less ineffective politically than Franco's victory and the world's continuing strife might make him seem. "That Pablo Casals!" one Fascist general remarked. "I will tell you what I will do to him if I catch him. I will put an end to his agitation. I will cut off his arms--both of them--at the elbow!" And Casals indicated in 1970 how the Loyalist leaders regarded him:

One day Gassol asked me if I would perform at a special concert...I said yes, of course, I would. But I did not know at first what the government was planning. They announced on the radio and in the newspapers that I was to play and also that during the two hours of the concert all work was to stop in the territory of the Republic!...For me that concert had a profound significance. It demonstrated how men and women, fighting for their very lives, at a moment of gravest crisis, found time to express their love of art and beauty. It was an affirmation of the indomitable spirit of man.

I heard Casals speak once, at a special concert in New York City's Central Park last summer. He was supposed to perform, but it was pouring rain, and so he simply spoke. According to The New York Times, he told us "to be young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true," but I don't remember that. I remember his standing under the bandshell, a little, insignificant-looking man, and telling us that he loved us all, and thousands of people standing in the rain and cheering.