fabcello
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(9/6/00 9:30:49 pm)
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Re:
Pablo Casals (This is Long)
Yeah, very funny too I hear, and
also an avid tennis player. An awesome guy, humanitarian, and
cellist. Excepert from a paper I wrote a couple of years
ago:
Very few people would dispute that the cellist Pablo Casals,
from Spain, made the greatest impact on cello playing in the
twentieth century. During the span of Pablo Casals’s life
(1876-1973), cello technique was highly revolutionized. Technique,
interpretation, and an overall level of playing increased as the
virtuoso, Casals set new standards. “Throughout most of his long
life Pablo Casals was a world renowned performer, whose pioneering
musical style and unusual life never ceased to amaze” (Markevitch 4 .
Pablo
Casals was born on December 29, 1876, in the town of Vendrell, in
Spain, near Barcelona. Casals’s parents were Carlos Casals, a piano
teacher, and Pilar Defilló, one of Carlos’s best students. Casals,
being born in a musical family, became a prodigy. Casals’s father
began to teach him how to play the piano at the tender age of four.
Along with the piano, Casals also started to take violin lessons. As
a result of his father, who played the organ with the choir, Casals
started to sing second soprano in the church choir, and was paid ten
cents each Sunday. When Pablo was nine, he was tall enough to reach
the organ pedals, so he started to learn how to play. Casals became
so proficient at the organ, that he soon was able to substitute
playing at the church, when his father was sick. Pablo Casals heard
a real cello for the first time when he was eleven. A trio from
Barcelona had come to Vendrell to play a concert, and the cellist
José García was playing in the trio. During the concert, Casals fell
in love with the deep, mesmerizing tone of the cello. “As the
cellist José García, fingered his instrument with his left hand and
gracefully pulled the bow across the strings with his right, sweet,
soulful tenor sounds filled the hall, and the boy was enchanted”
(Garza 33). After a period of begging his father for a cello, Carlos
Casals made sacrifices, and purchased a three-quarter size cello
from the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona, where the cellist
José García taught cello. For months, Casals worked intensively on
teaching himself how to play the cello. From Casals’s extra hard
work that he focused on the cello, Pilar, his mother, realized that
Pablo’s relationship with the cello was totally different than his
relationship with other instruments. Pablo had finally found his
passion and future. Although Casals’s father was a lover of music
himself, he thought that there would be no future in music for his
son. Carlos thought that musicians never make a good living, since
one must be the best of the best to have a good career. Casals’s
father wanted his son to have a ‘real’ job as a carpenter. Before
Casals’s twelfth birthday, he and his mother, set off on a train to
Barcelona, against the will of Carlos Casals, in search of cello
lessons.
When Casals and his mother arrived in Barcelona, they
stayed with distant relatives. Not too long after they arrived in
Barcelona, Casals started a five-year period of cello lessons, his
first formal training from a teacher, and the only formal training
from a teacher that he would ever have. Casals’s teacher was José
García, the same cellist that Casals saw in concert when he was a
child. It was here, at the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona,
that Casals started to experiment with new techniques on how to play
the cello. Back then; it was very common for cellist to play with a
stiff and unnatural bow arm. It was also a common practice for
cellist to practice playing with a book under their right armpit
when playing. It was also prevalent for players to slide their left
hand for a shift for about every three notes, to achieve higher
positions. The slide technique made many distasteful noises as the
hand slides from note to note. Casals noticed all of these problems,
and was luck enough to have a teacher who allowed him to experiment
and try new things. To fix the right arm problem, Casals lifted his
right arm from his armpits, allowing himself much more freedom and
expressiveness when bowing. For the left hand, to avoid the annoying
sliding sound, Casals extended his fingers down the string when
possible, instead of sliding. By developing his own techniques,
which made sense, Casals revolutionized cello technique. Casals
became so good, that he started to earn money playing with a trio at
a local café, to help pay for food, and their basic needs. At an
attempt to earn more money, and to prove something to his father,
Casals took a higher paying job at the Café Pajarera—the Bird Cage.
Casals’s father visited his son and wife in Barcelona about every
week. One special day in Pablo Casals’s life was when he got his
first full-size cello. Another week, Pablo and his father went
searching for music at an old second-hand shop. There, he found the
Beethoven Sonatas, and to his amazement, he stumbled across the Six
Suites for Unaccompanied Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach. According
to Casals:
I did not even know of their existence, and no one had
ever mentioned them to me. It was the great revelation of my life. I
immediately felt that this was something of exceptional importance,
and hugged my treasures all the way home. I started playing them in
a state of indescribable excitement. For twelve years I studied and
worked at them every day, and I was nearly twenty-five before I had
the courage to play one of them in public. Before I did, no
violinist or cellist had ever played a Suite in its entirety…In
those days these compositions were thought of as cold and academic
works. How could anyone think of Bach as ‘cold’, when these Suites
seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry? (Washington
146).
Because of Casals, the Bach Suites are one of the most
important pieces in the cello repertoire today.
Can not find
the rest...
~Frank~
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