Casals’ Double Discovery

It was a day of double discovery for the young cellist Pablo Casals. Years later he would remember it as a turning point in his career.

Young Casals told his father that he needed some new solo music to perform in a cafe. The two went off to look for some. Casals would remember that afternoon for two reasons. First his father bought him his first full-sized cello. Then they stopped at an old music shop. Casals began reading through a bundle of music scores. Suddenly he found a handful of pages that were crumbling and discolored with age. They were the “Six Suites for Violoncello Solo” by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the title alone, Casals saw magic and mystery.

He had never heard of them. Not even his teachers had ever mentioned the existence of the suites. Casals rushed home clasping the suites as if they were crown jewels. When he got t his room he read them over and over.

In the course of his long life Casals became world-renowned not only as a cellist but also as a conductor and a composer. Yet he never outgrew his fascination with the cello suites of Bach. In a 1970 interview he looked back 80 years at the continuing effect the suites had on his career, saying that they opened an entirely new world to him. He studied and worked on them every day for twelve years before he felt capable of performing them in public. Until then no violinist or cellist had ever played one of the Bach suites all the way through. The suites had been thought of as academic works, cold and mechanical. But to Pablo Casals they were the very essence of Bach and Bach was the essence of music.

While the Bach cello suites had an effect on Pablo Casals, he in turn had an effect on them–leading the way for their entry into the repertory of the world’s great performers.