I have read accounts of my life that give the impression that all of my days have been devoted to ceaseless work-to unrelieved practicing, performing, conducting, composing. I am aftaid I cannot claim to hve been such a paragon of labor. True, I have done my share of work-my cello is a demanding tyrant-but I have also had my share of relaxation, athletics and recreation. Since childhood I have not confined my playing to musical instruments! Some of my most enjoyable hours have been spent playing tennis, horseback riding, swimming, mountain climbing-and, more recently, at the pastime of dominoes. In spite of the demands made upon me by my duties with the Orquestra Pau Casals and my continuing concert tours, I still found time for other, less arduous forms of self-expression. They were, in fact, made possible by the proximity of San Salvador, where I had my beloved beach and my own tennis court.
My favorite sport at the time really was tennis. I had played a lot of tennis during the years in which I lived in Paris. We used to have our own annual contest among the musicians-Ysaye, Cortot, Thibaud and others. My doubles partner was an organist named Kelly; he played like a professional, and I myself was very fast on the court, and we always won the doubles championship. When I traveled to England, I used to visit Ridgehurst, the country estate of Sir Edward Speyer, the British Financier and famous patron of music, who helped found the Classical Concert Society-he was already almost seventy when we met, a wonderful old man, who had been friends with Joachim, Brahms, and other great musical figures. Speyer was a tennis enthusiast himself; he had a splendid court at Ridgehurst, and I always took my racket as well as my cello with me when I went there. In his memoirs Speyer recalls my arriving at his estate one day in the early 1900's-dressed in my white flannels-and saying, "First we'll play six sets of tennis and then the two Brahms sextets."
There were a number of fine tennis players who came to San Salvador, but I think the best of all was a Catalan girl, Panchita Subarina. She was then only fifteen or so, but she was marvelous! She was the best woman player I ever saw, and she went on to win many championships. Interestingly enough, we met again not long ago-some forty years after playing tennis together in San Salvador-when I attended a music festival in Israel. She had married an Israeli citizen and settled in Tel Aviv.
Tennis was to remain a passion with me over the years. I have continued to follow the game closely-I have known three generations of champions, beginning with such great players as Jean Borotra, who was called the "bounding Basque." One of the last games I played was with my god-son, Pablo Eisenberg, when he came with his parents to visit me in Prades in 1947-he was a junior champion at the time. I was then seventy-one....
When living abroad, I had always longed for my summer vacations at San Salvador. But after my return to Catalonia the house there really became my home. Though I still spent many weeks each year on tour and much time in Barcelona with my orchestra, I not only passed the summers at San Salvador but visitied it whenever I could. And what a joy it was to be there, with my mother and Luis and his family, and the beauty of the sea at my door!
As a boy, I had loved to ride horseback. Now I had a horse of my own. His name was Florian. He was a magnificent animal-an Andalusian Arab, large, jet-black, with excellent gaits. In the early mornings I would ride him along the beach, galloping to the music of the wind and the surf. We had a splendid comradeship. It was abaout two hundred yards from the house to his stable, but the moment I came out of the house in the early morning he would hear me and whinny in excitement. I had him from a colt, and he live to be twenty-four years old.
The other animals on our farm-geese, ducks, cows, burros, doves-were also a constant source of delight to me. Different personalities, all of them. There was one small burro of whom I was especially fond. He was so gentle, so friendly and intelligent-those who call burros stupid simply do not know these animals. I used to bring this burro into the house to bid good-morning to my young nieces and nephews. I think he relished this ceremony no less than the children did!
I had canaries too-eight of them in separate cages along the hallway leading to the small music room containing the piano that had belonged to my father. Each dawn when I had arisen and was about to commence the day by playing Bach at my father's piano, I would be greeted by their song. They would start singing the moment they heard my footsteps on the stairs, and they would continue their chorus while I played. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was their accompanist.
Alas, not all the memories of my animal friends at San Salvador are such happy ones. I had a dog, a German shepherd named Follet, who was like my shadow. He slept outside, but he knew my schedule to the minute, and when I left the house for my morning ride, he would be waiting for me on the doorstep. Then a terrible thing happened. One morning I opened the door, and there lay Follet in a pool of blood. He was dead, A trail of blood led all the way from his body to the front gate. During the night somebody had tried to force the gate open, and when Follet had apparently tried to guard it, the prowler had stabbed him, wounding him horribly. He had crawled from the gate to the front door, and there he had waited for me to the end. Such was the faithfulness of my friend.
There are, I know, people who do not love animals, but I think this is because they do not understand them-or because, indeed, they do not really see them. For me, animals have always been a special part of the wonder of nature-the smallest as well as the largest-with their amazing variety, their beautifully contrived shapes and fascinating habits. And I am captivated by the spirit of them. I find in them a longing to communicate and a real capacity for love. If sometimes they do not trust but fear man, it is because he has treated them with arrogance and insensitivity.
Toward the end of the 1920's I undertook extensive remodeling of my house in San Salvador. With the amount of time I now spent there, and with the number of friends who came to stay with me-like Horszowski, Maurice Eisenberg, and Sir Donald Francis Tovey-I needed more space. Then, too, comfortable as the house was, it lacked certain facilities-there was, for example, scant room for my books and the mementos I had accumulated over the years. I added on several rooms. One was a large music room, capable of seating several hundred people for concerts. Adjoining it I built a room I called Salle de Sentiments. Here I hung pictures of my mother and father, the Count de Morphy, my teachers and close friends, and here I kept certain cherished souvenirs, such as the windowsill stone I'd been given in Vienna from the room in which Beethoven had been born. Another room was one I had had transported intact from the eighteenth-century palace of a Catalan nobleman named Count de Guell. For me it embodied Catalan culture. It was a lovely salon with wall panels of paintings depicting alllegorical and pastoral scenes, a magnificently decorated ceiling, and graceful crystal chandeliers. Fronting the house I erected a high sea wall with a walk on top-you had a spectaculalr view of the ocean from there. About the grounds I added gardens, terraces and pools, which were shaded by cypress trees and provided the setting for several marble statues I had commissioned.
My favorite statue was one of Apollo. When I had first told the well-known Catalan sculptor, Jose Clara, that I wanted him to make an Apollo for me, he had been incredulous. "A statue of Apollo?" he said, laughing. "For modern scupltors, that's a thing of the past."
"No, don't laugh," I told him. "As I conceive of Apollo, he is not simply one of the ancient gods. For me he epitomizes the noblest qualities of man, You are a gifted sculptor, and you can make me an Apollo."
He shruuugged. "All right, Maestro...if that's what you want..." He was not exactly enthusiastic.
Sometime later I returned to Clara's studio to see how his work on the figure was progressing. He had made two maquettes. "Those are lovely studies of athletic youth," I told him, "but they are not Apollo." He was obviously skeptical. The next time I visited him, I brought along a book of mythology. I read him some passages about Apollo. I could tell from the way he listened that he was getting interested.
"You see," I said, "there is nothing dated about Apollo. He remains many things in one. He is not only the god of music and poetry who enchanted other gods with his playing of the lyre. He is also the god of medicine-the ancients understood the affinity between music and medicine, the healing qualities of both. You perhaps think of Apollo as an athlete because he was the patron of sports-but how much more he is! He deified the human form. He is an archer whose arrows are not used for war but against evil monsters. He brought harmony both to celestial bodies and to the affairs of men. And think of his concern for the simplest people, for sailors, travelers, emigrants-as the guardian of wayfarers, he watches over them and blesses them with gentle winds. safe harbors and new homes..."
Clara sat for some minutes in silence. "All right," he said, "I shall try again."
He did. He kept working until finally he produced the Apollo that I long to have. It is in my garden still at San Salvador-and despite the grief and turmoil of the intervening years, the ideals it embodies for me have not changed.
And when recently, for the first time since man came on this earth, he reached beyond it and voyaged toward the stars, how fitting it was that his ship should be named after Apollo-protector of wanderers and symbol of man!
It was in the winter of 1931 that my beloved mother died at the age of seventy-seven. I was away from San Salvador on a concert tour in Switzerland at the time-where I had been, strangely enough, at the time of my father's death twenty five years before. And again, as when my father died and I had a premonition of it, an extraordinary thing happened.
I had a dear friend in Florence whose name was Alberto Passigli. He was a prominent Italian businessman who was also an outstanding patron of music, and we had known each other intimately for years. On the day I received the telegram telling me of my mother's death, Passigli arrived in Geneva, where I was performing. He had come from Florence, he said, because he had felt I faced some sort of crisis and needed him. He did not know, of course, that my mother was dying, but his compulsion to come to me had been so great that he had simply left his business affairs and come to Geneva to be with me....
I have said what my mother meant to me, and though I knew she would one day have to die, it was somehow impossible for me to think of the world without her. I mourn her to this day. She was buried beside my father in the little graveyard near the church in Vendrell.