In an infamous radio broadcast from Seville on 17 July 1936, Franco’s brutal henchman and chief propagandist Gonzalo Queipo de Lano y Serra, one of the so-called ‘Four Insurgent Generals’, issued a grisly death warrant: “I will tell you what I will do to him if I catch him. I will put an end to his agitation. I will cut off his arms – both of them – at the elbow.” His intended victim: Pablo Casals, then in Barcelona rehearsing his orchestra for a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Choral’ Symphony to be given at the Palau de la Música de Catalana. Casals, paging through the score, had turned to the finale’s opening bars when a desperate messenger entered the hall relaying a dire warning from Minister of Culture Ventura Gasso to evacuate – Fascist General Manuel Goded’s troops were marching on Barcelona. Casals informed the orchestra and chorus and then put it to a vote – every man and woman elected to stay and complete Schiller’s Ode, Beethoven’s Ninth – “The orchestra played and the chorus sang as never before: ‘All mankind are sworn brothers where the gentle wings abide.’ I could not see the notes because of my tears. At the end I told my friends “The day will come when our country is once more at peace. On that day we shall play the Ninth again.”
Only five years before, on 15 April 1931, in honor of the newly proclaimed Spanish Republic, he’d led a celebratory Ninth (with the Orfeó Gracienc) at Montjuïc before an audience of 7,000. The world’s greatest cellist, and Spain’s most favorite son, lived in real peril, the threat of totalitarian execution as darkly ominous as it had been for Shostakovich in Stalinist Russia. Indeed, in 1936 the Soviet dictator would denounce the opera Lady MacBeth of Mtisnk and its composer. In little more than three years the Spain Casals knew would be forever changed, and the world plunged into the most destructive, horrific conflict in its history. And everything Casals had built during the last two decades would be irretrievably lost.
—Pablo Casals
“If I have been so happy up to now scratching away at my cello, how shall I feel when I can possess the greatest of all instruments – the orchestra!”
For nearly 20 years (1919-1937) Casals – for the first and only time in his long life – lived permanently in his native, beloved Catalonia. Although he continued to record prolifically and tour widely, much of his musical activity was centered in Barcelona, and it was here that the ‘Monarch of the Bow,’ as Kreisler dubbed him, effected several of his most remarkable musical achievements, principal among these the orchestra that would bear his name, the Orquesta Pau Casals. “We share a great privilege,” he would tell the 88 musicians assembled before him, “the privilege of bringing masterpieces to life. We also share a sacred responsibility. We are entrusted with the duty of interpreting these masterpieces with integrity,” adding “you are not servants of mine – we are all servants of the music.” The year was 1920 and Casals stood before an orchestra already sworn off by the city’s cognoscenti, berated by politicians in the press, denied sponsorship, and predicted a certain failure – all this before they’d even given their first concert. Yet with typical aplomb and brio, Casals would make fools of those who had underestimated him.
—Pablo Casals, quoted in Song of the Birds by Julian Lloyd Webber
“Making music is what interests me, and what better instrument can there be than the orchestra…It is the supreme medium for anyone who feels music profoundly and wishes to translate the form and shape of his deepest and most intimate thoughts and emotions. And what appeals to me equally is the idea of cooperation. I am enchanted by the experience of many gathered together to make music.”
In interviews given in 1953 with J. Ma. Corredor, published as Conversations with Casals (Hutchinson, London, 1956), the great cellist and conductor said: “Before anything else, a great conductor must be a great performer. The most convincing proof of his value can be found in his ability to get in touch with his musicians in order to communicate and convince them of his personal ideas…I admire a great many conductors, even if I don’t always agree with their rendering, but I certainly place Toscanini, Furtwängler and Stokowski at the top of the living conductors.” Of those gone before, he admired most Richter, Lamoureux, Steinbach, and Nikisch. By 1920 Casals was himself already an experienced conductor, having first led an orchestra at age 15 when he took over rehearsals of Granados’ zarzuela opera María del Carmen, its grateful composer indisposed by nervousness. He enjoyed long-standing relationship with the Lamoureux Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, that latter once presenting Casals with a magnificent pipe collection. With the LSO he recorded in February 1928 an expansive Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn Op. 56a ( D1376/78; Electrola 1C 187-03039/40-M; Pearl GEMM 9128) and a brooding Beethoven Coriolan Overture Op. 62 ( D1409/10; Electrola 1C 187 03039/40-M) – only the former has seen issue on CD. Casals not only conducted the New York Philharmonic (his debut made in 1922 in a program pairing Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony with Brahms’s First), BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Vienna Philharmonic, but also wielded the baton in Milan, Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, and Havana. Casals was at his best with orchestras he knew on a personal basis – guest engagements in unfamiliar surroundings could blunt the effectiveness of his expression. He conducted his first concert in London in 1925, leading the LSO at Queen’s Hall in a program that included Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony’ and Brahms’s ‘Tragic’ Overture. Wrote the Times: “under him the orchestra carves out every phrase as if with the bow on the strings.”