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Paying Homage to Casals, an Artist of Conscience By SELMA GOKCEN AND JONATHAN C. KRAMER
Throughout his long career as an internationally acclaimed artist, Pablo Casals (1876-1973) was a symbol of the aspirations of his oppressed countrymen, a beacon of freedom in a world darkened by fascism, and—as an old man—the center of pilgrimage for the greatest musicians of his time and a leading activist for peace. On October 9, we will present a program at New York's 92nd Street Y titled "Pablo Casals, Artist of Conscience: An Homage to the Great Cellist and Humanitarian." Through words, texts, and music, we will explore the intellectual, artistic, cultural, and spiritual roots of Casals' musical thought, and his contributions to the expressive potential of his instrument and the art of interpretation.
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| Pablo Casals in Brussels, 1965. (Photo courtesy of the Museu Pau Casals) |
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Why Casals? Why now? It is our conviction that Casals made music with such intensity, passion, integrity, and purpose that he might serve as a model for young musicians. And he lived his life with such intensity, passion, integrity, and purpose that he might serve as a model for us all. It is also our concern that Casals' memory may fade with the passing of the years, and of those who knew him. Bach, the summation of the Baroque, was forgotten in the succeeding era of the Rococo, which found little sympathy for his contrapuntal rigors. It was almost 50 years after his death before Forkel published the first biography, 70 years before Mendelssohn conducted the St. Matthew Passion and Berlioz proclaimed, "Bach is Bach, as God is God!" Could it be that Casals may also need to be similarly resurrected and revered? He, like Bach, lived at the end of a great musical age and consolidated its expressive possibilities as its greatest interpreter. His interpretive method—based as it was on rigorous analysis, instinct and intuition—has been eclipsed in the past half-century by notions of "historical authenticity" on the one hand and hyped-up virtuosity on the other. For Casals, the interpretive artist was a mediator between the lifeless notes on the page, and the living forces of motion and emotion that the notes might evoke in the here-and-now of their performance.Particularly in his rendering of Bach, whom he esteemed above all other composers, Casals felt none of the insecurity that many performers feel today, bedeviled with questions of "How is it supposed to go?" Casals never felt that Bach spoke a language foreign to his own (although, unlike Bach, he was raised on sardanas—the traditional Catalan dance—by the Mediterranean, and later in life, flew in airplanes). He believed that Bach's music was a universal language whose meaning was implicit in its melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structures.Imagine the following fantastic scenario: Historians of the theater exhume skulls of Elizabethan actors in order to determine, by electron-microscope analysis of grooves in the jawbone, the precise pronunciation of each letter of the Shakespearean phonetic alphabet. Now, suppose that actors working today were made to believe that, unless their pronunciation of late 16th-century p's and q's were "historically informed," their interpretations of Hamlet and Macbeth would be "inauthentic." Imagine the straitjacketing of their creativity, intuition, and imagination. The scenario is, of course, absurd, because we understand that, with language, the sound and meaning are not absolutely linked (making translation possible) and that actors build a performance on their understanding of the meaning of the text, and use diction, gesture, intonation, and what other expressive skills they have to convey that meaning to an audience of their contemporaries. Not authenticity, but power and insight, are the criteria of great performances in the theater.And power and insight were exactly the criteria that Casals sought in his interpretations. He had little patience with those whom he called "the purists." While his recordings may now, to some, seem dated or old-fashioned, to those who heard him live in his prime, his playing was revelatory. His performances, like those of great actors, had the power to move the human soul, to convey the joy, terror, sorrow, and pity of human life, through music, to his audience. There is a story of an Italian janitor listening backstage to a performance of a Bach suite and saying to a colleague, "Verdi always makes me weep." For Casals, music was poetry, song, dance, and rhetoric; it was expression, and profoundly tied to a sense of life lived—its dynamic relationships, pulls and stresses. And this brings us to the heart of the matter, for the way he played was also the way he lived. Intonation was a matter of conscience. The study of a musical phrase was a quest for truth, meaning, and value. His career was a way of serving his fellow men and women and of honoring his responsibility as a human being to connect with the human family, using his art as the means. In his own eloquent words: "I am a man first, an artist second. As a man, my first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow men. I will endeavor to meet this obligation through music—the means which God has given me—since it transcends language, politics, and national boundaries. My contribution to world peace may be small, but at least I will have given all I can to an ideal I hold sacred."In an almost naive way, he found the coexistence of music and war, music and tyranny, utterly bewildering. He had seen more than his share of war and of tyranny in his lifetime, and devoted his last years to a self-directed crusade for peace and justice. His cello and his baton became weapons against weapons, his life a war against war. When, at the age of 96, he played his signature anthem, the Catalan folksong Song of the Birds, at the United Nations, it was the culminating moment in a life of service to music and humanity. It was also a triumph of the human spirit when he declared that the birds in the song sang of peace to a war-torn world. His art became an embodiment of that most ancient and fervent prayer: that we can live together in peace and thereby be worthy of the beauty and grace that life can bestow. How little we now ask of our great artists—that they play higher and faster and louder, as though that were the point, rather than finding a way to reach and sanctify, through music, the human soul.For ticket information, call the 92nd Street Y at (212) 415-5500 or visit the 92nd St. Y Web site.Cellist Selma Gokcen holds a B.M., M.M., and D.M.A. from Juilliard. She resides in London, where she performs and teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Cellist Jonathan C. Kramer is professor of arts studies at North Carolina State University and adjunct professor of ethnomusicology at Duke University.
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