Chapter 52
Good Monday Evening to this last week of 2022
A laudation and a celebration to life found in humble beginnings. As we review
the year 2022 and slowly prepare to move on.
Do not despise humble beginnings. Zechariah 4.10
“Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe a moment that never was before and never will be again” Pablo Casals
Bachs (1685-1750) “Cello Suites” were discovered and finally published in 1825. But in spite of their publication, they were not widely known by anyone besides a few cellists who viewed them as exercises, if they viewed them at all. The development of the cello as a solo instrument continued without Bach’s influence for another century, during which, again, virtually no music for solo cello was written.
Then in 1889 there was a the spark of discovery. A 13-year-old Catalan wunderkind cellist by the name of Pablo Casals went for a stroll with his father, and they stepped into a second-hand music shop. There, Casals stumbled upon an old copy of Bach’s Cello Suites. He took them home, began to play them, and fell in love.
Casals was born in El Vendrell, Tarragona, Spain. His father, was a parish organist and choirmaster. He gave Casals instruction in piano, songwriting, violin, and organ. When Casals was small 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 eleven, he first heard the real cello performed by a group of traveling musicians, and decided to dedicate himself to the instrument. His mother, Pilar Defilló de Casals, was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, to parents who were Catalan immigrants in Puerto Rico. In 1888, she took her son to Barcelona, where he was enrolled in the Escola Municipal de Música. – Back to 1889, to the spark of discovery on the stroll with his father to a second-hand music shop.
The young Casals disagreed with the technical constraints advocated by his instructors, preferring to bow and finger the cello in his own manner. His progress was extraordinary, however, and soon Casals’s revolutionary techniques had exposed “a range of phrasing, intonation, and expressiveness that had not previously been thought possible, and [made] the cello an instrument of high purpose.
“The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. ” Pablo Casals
What audiences heard in Casals’s playing was a suffused reverence for everything around him. “I have the idea of God constantly, I find Him in music. What is that world, what is music but God? Those feelings were heightened for Casals in nature and in the music of Bach, as he indicated when he continued, explaining his morning ritual: “I go immediately to the sea, and everywhere I see God, in the smallest and largest things. I see Him in colors and designs and forms and I see God in Bach.
“In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness, I see God, in all these things.”
“To live is not enough; we must take part.”
It was Pablo Casals, who by rather random incident, discovered the Cello Suits of Bach brought them to life and made the known to all, through great talent, but very humble beginnings.
I wish you a blessed week as you reflect the past year and prepare to the next year!
Philemon
Ps: All quotes by Pablo Casals