The tale of the Nativity has always had a special meaning for me.
One of the first compositions on which I worked-I was six or seven at the time-was the music my father and I wrote for a performance of Els Pastorets, the "Adoration of the Shepherds." The pageant took place at the Catholic Center in Vendrell, and I played the part of the devil, who plotted-devilishly, of course-all sorts of cunning schemes to prevent the shepherds and Wise Men from getting to Bethlehem.
More than seventy years later, when I was already living in exile from Spain after the Civil War, I began the custom of concluding concerts and music festivals with the melody of an old Catalan folk song which is actually a Christmas carol. It is called El Cant del Ocells, the "Song of the Birds." The melody then came to be known as the nostalgic theme of the Spanish refugees. Today in the village of Molitg-les-Bains in the French Pyrenees, adjoining the lovely spa of the Hotel Grand Thermal, I have a cottage at which I have stayed in recent years during the prades music festivals. The owner of the hotel has placed a carillon of fifteen bells in a tower there. I recorded the "Song of the Birds" for the bells, and every hour you can hear its haunting melody sing out, echoing among the mountains. On the largest bell is an inscription which says that through this song I speak of the sorrow and homesickness of Catalans. It adds, "May this be for them tomorrow-a song of peace ahd hope."
Ten years ago, when what people call the Cold War had become intense and the fear of atomic war spread through the world, I embarked on a peace crusade of my own, with the only weapon I have at my command-my music. Again, it was to the story of the Nativity that I turned. I had written an oratorio called El Pessebre (The manger), based on a poem about the Nativity by my dear friend, the Catalan writer Joan Alavedra; and I began taking this oratorio to the capitals of many lands. Through this music I have sought to draw attention to the suffering that afflicts humanity, to the fearful danger of nuclear war, and to the happiness man can attain if all men work together as brothers and in peace: so, in this nuclear age, the ancient tale of the Nativity has a special urgency for me.
How beautiful and tender is that tale, with its reverence for life and for man, the noblest expression of life! And think of its symbolism: the symbol of the mother and the child-of birth and creation; the symbol of the shepherds, common working people, who revere the newborn child with his promise of a joyous world; the symbol of the Prince of Peace, born not in a palace but in a stable. How simple and yet how profoundly meaningful!
And how much of nature comes into this tale! In the Catalan carol, "Song of the Birds," it is the eagles and the sparrows, the nightingales and the little wrens that sing a welcome to the infant, singing of him as a flower that will delight the earth with its sweet scent. And the thrushes and linnets sing that spring has come and tree leaves are unfolding and growing green.
In El Pessebre, the fisherman sings:
In the river that passes
The current I see!
In waves of reflection
My fish wait for me
Whose tails are dancing
And shining and sparkling
As clearly and freshly
As silver and gold.
Yet throughout this tale of the nativity there is an awareness of man's suffering-a premonition of what the Christ child will one day endure. And this is expressed in the song of a woman weaving a shroud for that future time of pain and torment...
Finally, the angels and shepherds sing together, "Glory to God! Peace to the earth! War shall forever disappear. Peace to all men!"
I have said that when I was seven I worked on my first composition on the nativity, but of course I knew the tale before that. One of my very earliest and most indelible memories is of a Christmas Mass at the church in Vendrell. I was then five years old and had started to sing in the choir a few months before. In Vendrell there was no midnight Mass, and I was to sing on Christmas at la misa del gallo-the "mass of the Cock"-which was held at five o'clock in the morning. I hardly slept the night before, and it was pitch-black when my father came into my room to tell me it was time to get ready to go to the services. When we stepped out of the house it was dark and cold-so cold that bundled up as I was, the chill went right through my clothes and I shivered as we walked, though I did not shiver only because of the cold. It was all so mysterious; I felt that something wonderful was about to happen. High overhead the heavens were still full of stars, and as we walked in silence I held my father's hand, feeling he was my protector and guide. The village was hushed, and in the dark narrow streets there were moving figures, shadowy and spectral and silent too, moving toward the church in the starry night. Then, suddenly, there was a burst of light-flooding from the open doors of the church. We moved into that light and into the church, silently, with the other people. My father played the organ, and when I sang, it was my heart that was singing and I poured out everything that was in me...
From infancy I was surrounded by music. You might say music was for me an ocean in which I swam like a little fish. Music was inside me and all about me; it was the air I breathed from the time I could walk. To hear my father play the piano was an ecstasy for me. When I was two or three, I would sit on the floor beside him as he played, and I would press my head against the piano in order to absorb the sound more completely. I could sing in tune before I could speak clearly; notes were as familiar to me as words. My father used to have my little brother Artur and me stand behind the piano-we were too small to see over the top of it-and he would stand in front of the piano with his back to it. Reaching behind him and spreading out the fingers of both hands, he would strike chords at random on the piano. "Now what notes did I play?" he would say. And we would have to name all the notes in the dissonant chords he had played. Then he would do it again, and again. Artur was two years younger than I was-he died at five from spinal meningitis. He was a lovely little boy, and he had a sharper ear for music than mine.
I began playing the piano when I was four years old. I must say I am glad I learned to play the piano at the very beginning. For me It is the best of all instruments-yes, despite my love of the cello. On a piano you can play anything that has been written. Violinists, for example, have a big repertory and many do not have or take the time to learn what composers have written for other instruments or for the orchestra as a whole; and so, in that sense, many are not complete musicians. With the piano it is a different matter; the instrument encompasses everything. That is why everyone who wants to devote his life to music should know how to play the piano, whether or not he prefers another instrument. I can say that I became a good pianist-although I am afraid that I no longer am. I have no technique now. But every morning of course I still play the piano.
It was my father who taught me to play the piano and gave me my first lessons in composition. It was he who taught me how to sing. I was five when I became a second soprano in the church choir. It was a momentous event in my life-to actually be a member of the choir and to sing while my father played the organ! I was paid for every service; my fee amounted to the sum of ten cents; and so one might say that this was my first professional job as a musician. It was for me a very serious duty, and I felt responsible not only for my own singing but for the singing of the other boys as well. I was the youngest member of the choir, but I would say, "Watch it, now! Be careful with that note." It would seem I already had aspriations to be a conductor.
Sometimes I awakened in the morning to the sound of folk songs, the villagers-fishermen and men who worked in the vineyards-singing as they went to work. Sometimes in the evening there were dances in the plaza and sometimes festivals at which the gralla was played. The gralla is a reed instrument which, I think, is probably of Moorish origin-it resembles an oboe and has a very strident sound. Every day I would hear my father playing the piano or the organ. There were his songs and church music and compositions of the masters. He took me to all the services at the church-the Gregorian chant, the chorals and organ voluntaries became part of my daily life. And then, too, there were always the wonderful sounds of nature, the sound of the sea, the sound of the wind moving through the trees, the delicate singing of the birds, the infinitely varied melody of the human voice, not only in song but in speech. What a wealth of music! It sustained and nourished me.
I was curious about all instruments, and I wanted to play them all. By the time I was seven I was playing the violin, and I played a solo at a concert in Vendrell at the age of eight. I longed especially to play the organ. But my father said I could not touch the instrument until my feet could reach the pedals. How I waited for that day! I was never very tall, so the day took somewhat longer to arrive than it would have for another child. In fact, it seemed to me an interminable time. I kept on trying, sitting at the stool alone in the church and stretching out my feet, but-alas!-that did not help me grow any more quickly. The great moment finally came when I was nine. I hurried to my father and told him, "Father, I can touch the pedals!" He said, "Let me see." I reached out my feet and they touched-barely, but they touched. My father said, "All right, now you can play the organ." It was a lovely old instrument, made at the same time as the one that Bach used in Leipzig. It is still in the church in Vendrell.
Before long I had learned to play the organ well enough so that I sometimes took my father's place when he was ill or busy with some other work. Once when I had finished playing and was leaving the church, a friend of my father's who was a shoemaker came up to me and said, "How magnificently your father played today!" At that time, shoemakers in our village worked in the streets, sitting on stools. This man had been sitting outside the church and listening while he worked. I told the shoemaker that my father was not well, and that I was the one who had been playing. At first he would not believe me, but I assured him it was so. He summoned his wife and told her with great excitement, "That was not Carlos at the organ. You will not believe me, but it was Pablito!" The shoemaker and his wife put their arms around me and kissed me; then they took me into their house and gave me biscuits and wine.
In those days, bands of itinerant musicians wandered from village to village, eking out a meager existence on whatever money the villagers could spare them. They played in the streets and at village dances. They often dressed in bizarre costumes, and performed on a weird variety of instruments, often of their own contriving. I always greeted their arrival with great excitement. One day a group of three such musicians came to Vendrell; they called themselves Los Tres Bemoles, or The Three Flats. I made my way to the front of the crowd that had gathered in the plaza to hear them, and I crouched there on the cobblestones completely enthralled, enchanted by the appearance of the players-they were dressed as clowns-and I listened spellbound to every note they played. I was especially fascinated by their instruments. They had mandolins, bells, guitars, and even instruments made out of kitchen utensils like teapots, cups and glasses-I think these instruments must surely have been the forerunners of some of the curious contraptions that are played in jazz orchestras today. One man played on a broom handle that was strung something like a cello-though I had never seen or even heard of a cello at that time. For some reason-possibly I had some sort of prescience!-that broom-handle instrument fascinated me most of all. I couldn't take my eyes off it. It sounded wonderful to me. When I went home, I told my father breathlessly about it. He laughed, but I talked so passionately about it that he said, "All right, Pablo, I'll make you an instrument like it." And he did-though I must say it was a considerable improvement on the broom handle and sounded much better. He fashioned it out of a gourd, with a single string. I suppose you might say that this instrument was my first cello. I still have it at San Salvador. I have kept it in a glass case, like a real museum treasure.
On that homemade contrivance I learned to play many of the songs my father wrote, as well as popular melodies that reached our village from the outer world. Years later, when I was visiting the nearby ancient monastery of Santes Creus, I met an old innkeeper who said that he remembered hearing me play that strnge instrument one night, when I was a boy of nine, in the cloisters of the monastery. And I too remembered that night-when I played in the moonlight and the music echoed among the shadows and against the crumbling white monastery walls...
I see no particular merit in the fact that I was an artist at the age of eleven. I was born with an ability, with music in me, that is all. No special credit was due me. The only credit we can claim is for the use we make of the talent we are given. That is why I urge young musicians: "Don't be vain because you happen to have talent. You are not responsible for that; it was not of your doing. What you do with your talent is what matters. You must cherish this gift. Do not demean or waste what you have been given. Work-work constantly and nourish it."
Of course the gift to be cherished most of all is that of life itself. One's work should be a salute to life.