Pablo Casals (29 December 1876 – 22 October 1973), also known by his birth name, Pau Casals i Defilló (Catalan: [ˈpaw kəˈzalz i ðəfiˈʎo]), was a Catalan cellist, composer, and conductor, born in Spain. He made many recordings throughout his career of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, including some as conductor, but he is perhaps best remembered for the recordings he made of the Cello Suites by Bach.
Casals had an international career and traveled and performed widely. With the fall of Republican Spain to the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco in 1939, Casals went into self-exile, refusing to return to Spain until democracy was restored. He lived in Prades, France from 1939 to 1956, and then in Ceiba, Puerto Rico from 1956 until his death in 1973.
President John F. Kennedy awarded Casals the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, though the ceremony was presided over by President Johnson. One of his last compositions was the Hymn to the United Nations, which he conducted at the United Nations in 1971. At that event, he was awarded the U.N. Peace Medal in recognition of his stance for peace, justice and freedom. In accepting the award, he gave a short speech I Am a Catalan and performed the traditional Catalan song, El Cant dels Ocells (Catalan: [əl ˈkan dəlz uˈseʎs], 'The Song of the Birds').
Casals was born in El Vendrell, Catalonia, Spain. His father, Carles Casals i Ribes, was a parish organist and choirmaster. His mother, Doña Pilar Defilló de Casals, was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, to parents who were Catalan immigrants in Puerto Rico. Casals' father gave him instruction in piano, songwriting, violin, and organ. He was also a very strict disciplinarian. When Casals was young, his father would pull the piano out from the wall and have him and his brother, Artur, stand behind it and name the notes and the scales that his father was playing. At the age of four, Casals could play the violin, piano and flute; at the age of six he played the violin well enough to perform a solo in public. His first encounter with a cello-like instrument was from witnessing a local travelling Catalan musician, who played a cello-strung broom handle. Upon request, his father built him a crude cello, using a gourd as a sound-box. When Casals was 11 years old, he first heard the real cello performed by a group of traveling musicians, and decided to dedicate himself to the instrument.
In 1888, Casals' mother took him to Barcelona, where he was enrolled in the Escola Municipal de Música. There he studied cello, theory, and piano. In 1890, when he was 13, he had a formative event. As he recalled, For two reasons I shall never forget that afternoon. First, my father bought me my first full-size cello – how proud I was to have that wonderful instrument! Then we stopped at an old music shop near the harbour [in Barcelona]. I began browsing through a bundle of musical scores. Suddenly I came upon a sheaf of pages, crumpled and discoloured with age. They were unaccompanied suites by Johann Sebastian Bach – for the cello only! I looked at them with wonder: Six Suites for Violoncello Solo. What magic and mystery, I thought, were hidden in those words?... That scene has never grown dim. He spent the next 13 years practicing the Six Suites every day before he would perform them in public for the first time. Casals would later make his own version of the six suites. Written in the early 1700s, but only published in 1825, this preeminent work for the cello was largely neglected until it was rediscovered, performed, and recorded by Casals.
Casals made prodigious progress as a cellist. On 23 February 1891 he gave a solo recital in Barcelona at the age of fourteen. He graduated from the Escola with honours five years later.
In 1893, Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz heard him playing in a trio in a café and gave him a letter of introduction to the Count Guillermo Morphy, the private secretary to María Cristina, the Queen Regent of Spain. Casals was asked to play at informal concerts in the palace, and was granted a royal stipend to study composition at the Madrid Royal Conservatory in Madrid with Víctor Mirecki. He also played in the newly organised Quartet Society.
In 1895, he traveled to Paris, where, having lost his stipend, he earned a living by playing second cello in the theatre orchestra of the Folies Marigny. In 1896, he returned to Spain and received an appointment to the faculty of the Escola 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.
In 1899, Casals played at The Crystal Palace in London, and later for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, her summer residence, accompanied by Ernest Walker. On 12 November, and 17 December 1899, he appeared as a soloist at the Lamoureux Concerts in Paris, to great public and critical acclaim. He toured Spain and the Netherlands with the pianist Harold Bauer from 1900 to 1901; in 1901/02, he made his first tour of the United States; and in 1903 toured South America.
On 15 January 1904, Casals was invited to play at the White House for President Theodore Roosevelt. On 9 March of that year, he made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, playing Richard Strauss's Don Quixote under the baton of the composer. 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 relationship ended in 1912.
The New York Times of 9 April 1911 announced that Casals would perform at the London Musical Festival to be held at the Queen's Hall on the second day of the Festival (23 May). The piece chosen was Haydn's Cello Concerto in D and Casals would later join Fritz Kreisler for Brahms's Double Concerto for Violin and Cello.
Although Casals made his first recordings in 1915 (a series for Columbia), he would not release another recording until 1926 (on the Victor label).
Back in Paris, Casals organized a trio with the pianist Alfred Cortot and the violinist Jacques Thibaud; they played concerts from 1906 to 1933, and made recordings from 1926 to 1929. Casals also became interested in conducting, and in 1919 he organized, in Barcelona, the Pau Casals Orchestra and led its first concert on 13 October 1920.
Casals was also a composer. Perhaps his most effective work is La Sardana, for an ensemble of cellos, which he composed in 1926.
In 1936 civil war broke out in Spain between the Nationalist forces of Francisco Franco and the Spanish Republican government. With the outbreak of the War, the Orquestra Pau Casals ceased its activities. In the last weeks of 1936, he stayed in Prades, a small village in France near the Spanish border in Pyrénées-Orientales.
Throughout most of his professional career, he played on a cello that was labeled and attributed to "Carlo Tononi ... 1733" but after he had been playing it for 50 years it was discovered to have been created by the Venetian luthier Matteo Goffriller around 1700. Casals acquired it in 1913. He also played another cello by Goffriller dated 1710, and a Tononi from 1730.
Casals was an ardent supporter of the Republican government, and after its defeat in 1939, he vowed not to return to Spain until democracy was restored. Casals performed at the Gran Teatre del Liceu on 19 October 1938, possibly his last performance in Spain before his exile. With the Fall of Barcelona in 1939, Casals left Spain to live in Prades, an historically Catalan region.
Between 1939 and 1942 he made sporadic appearances as a cellist in the unoccupied zone of southern France and in Switzerland. He was mocked by the Francoist press, which wrote articles deriding him as "a donkey", and was fined one million pesetas for his political views. So fierce was his opposition to Francoist Spain that he refused to appear in countries that recognized the Spanish government.