Pau Carlos Salvador Casals i Defilló (29th December 1876 – 22nd October 1973), commonly known as Pablo Casals, was a virtuoso Catalan cello player, and later conductor.

Throughout his career, he made many recordings of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, and also as conductor, but Casals is best remembered for the recording of Bach’s Cello Suites he made from 1936 to 1939.

Early years

Casals was born in El Vendrell, Catalonia (Spain). His father, Carles Casals i Ribes (1852-1908), was a parish organist and choirmaster. He gave Casals instruction in piano, violin, and organ.

At the age of 4, Casals could play the violin, piano and flute. When Casals was 11, he first heard the cello performed by a group of traveling musicians, and decided to dedicate himself to the instrument.

In 1888 his mother, Pilar Defilló de Casals, who was born in Puerto Rico of Catalan ancestry, took him to Barcelona, where he enrolled in the Escuela Municipal de Música. There he studied cello, theory, and piano.

He made prodigious progress as a cellist and on 23rd February 23 1891 he gave a solo recital in Barcelona at the age of 14. He graduated with honours from the Escuela two years later.

In 1893, the Spanish composer Albéniz heard him playing in a trio in a café and gave him a letter of introduction to the private secretary to María Cristina, the Queen Regent, in Madrid.

Casals was asked to play at informal concerts in the palace, and was granted a royal stipend to study composition at the Conservatory de Musica y Declamacion in Madrid with the master Víctor Mirecki. He also played in the newly organized Quartet Society.

In 1895 he went to Paris, where, having lost his stipend from Spain, he earned a living by playing second cello in the theater orchestra of the Folies Marigny.

In 1896, he returned to Spain and received an appointment to the faculty of the Escuela Municipal de Música in Barcelona. He was also appointed principal cellist in the orchestra of Barcelona’s opera house, the Liceu. In 1897 he appeared as soloist with the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, and was awarded the Order of Carlos III from the Queen.

International career

In 1899, Casals played at The Crystal Palace in London, and later for Queen Victoria at her summer residence at Cowes, Isle of Wight. 

On 12th November 12 1899, he appeared as a soloist at a prestigious Lamoureux Concert in Paris, and played at Lamoureux again on 17th December 17 1899, with great public and critical acclaim.

At the turn of the century, he toured Spain and the Netherlands with the pianist Harold Bauer and in 1901-1902, made his first tour of the United States. In 1903 he headed down to tour South America.

On 15th January 1904, he was invited to play at the White House for president Theodore Roosevelt and on 9th March of that same year, made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, playing Richard Strauss’s “Don Quixote”.

Back in Paris, Casals organized a trio with the pianist Alfred Cortot and the violinist Jacques Thibaud; they played concerts and made recordings until 1937. Casals also became interested in conducting, and in 1919 he organized, in Barcelona, the Orquesta Pau Casals and led its first concert on 13th October 13 1920.

Personal Life and Politics

In 1906 he became associated with the talented young Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia, who studied with him and began to appear in concerts as Mme. P. Casals-Suggia, although they were not legally married. Their liaison was dissolved in 1912 and in 1914 Casals married the American socialite and singer, Susan Metcalfe. They were separated in 1928, but did not divorce until 1957.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Orquesta Pau Casals ceased its activities. Casals was an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican government, and after its defeat vowed never to return to Spain until democracy was restored.

He settled in the French village of Prades, on the Spanish border and between 1939 and 1942 he made sporadic appearances as a cellist in the unoccupied zone of southern France and in Switzerland.

So fierce was his opposition to the Francisco Franco regime in Spain that he declined to appear in countries that recognized the totalitarian Spanish government, making an exception when he took part in a concert of chamber music in the White House on 13th November 1961, at the invitation of President John F Kennedy, whom he admired.

In 1950 he resumed his career as conductor and cellist at the Prades Festival, organized in commemoration of the bicentennial of the death of Bach; he continued leading the Prades Festivals until 1966.

In 1956, he made his permanent residence San Juan, Puerto Rico, where his mother had been born (when the island was still under Spanish rule). In 1957 an annual Casals Festival was inaugurated there.

Later Years

On 3rd August 1957, at the age of 80, Casals married Marta Montañez Martinez, one of his most promising young pupils.

Throughout the 1960s, Casals gave many master classes in Switzerland, Italy, Berkeley, California, and Marlboro, Vermont, some of which were televised.

Casals was also a composer and perhaps his most effective work is La Sardana, for an ensemble of cellos, which he composed in 1926. His oratorio, El pesebre (The Manger), was performed for the first time in Acapulco, Mexico, on 17th December 1960.

One of his last compositions was the Himno a las Naciones Unidas (Hymn of the United Nations); he conducted its first performance in a special concert at the United Nations on 24th October 24 1971, 2 months before his 95th birthday.

In 1973, Casals wrote a memoir, Joys and Sorrows; Reflections.

In that same year, aged 96, Casals died in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1979 his mortal remains were finally laid to rest in his beloved home town of El Vendrell, Catalonia.

He did not live to see the end of the Franco regime, but he was posthumously honored by the Spanish government under King Juan Carlos I, which issued in 1976 a commemorative postage stamp in honor of his 100th birthday.

British music critic W.J. Turner heard Casals play in Vienna in November, 1913. He wrote shortly thereafter in a letter:

…his playing… “is one of those rare things that may only come once in a lifetime and even not in one person’s life, it may be centuries before there is anyone like that again. He is a funny little fellow only about 30 and plays with his eyes shut practically the whole time, every note every pause and tone colour is reflected in his face and to hear him again, to draw the bow across is a revelation.”
From Wikipedia