Pau casals biography
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On vacation touring Alaska, in constant awe of the seemingly boundless display of spectacular natural beauty, it seemed appropriate to reflect on the life and art of Pablo Casals. Not only was Casals the greatest cellist of all time but, like the vast, unsullied Alaskan scenery, he was a pure force of nature &#; towering and uncompromising.
Casals' significance transcended his musicianship, phenomenal though it was. In the words of Thomas Mann's eloquent tribute, his "proud, utterly incorruptible integrity purifies and elevates our conception of the artist" and was "the symbol of the indissoluble union of art and morality." Yehudi Menuhin agreed: his "simplicity, grandeur and integrity restore our faith in human nature." Or, as Casals put it more humbly: "A musician is also a man, and more important than his music is his attitude to life."
Casals' art is intimately bound to his life; it's pointless to consider one without the other. His outlook was molded in his native Catalonia, an intensely verdant mountainous pocket of the Pyrenees with a history of democracy and fierce independence from neighboring Spain, to which its language and culture were often subjugated. Although his father, the local church organist, wanted Pablo to become a carpenter, his mother (an ardent
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Pablo Casals: a total musician
Pablo Casals was an unconventional conductor. Nevertheless, he was a great conductor. Previously recognised as a brilliant cellist, he was a self-taught conductor with a genuine and original way of communicating with musicians. The musical advisor to the Pau Casals Foundation, Bernard Meiller, describes this unique facet of the maestro.
Pablo Casals was an innovator in cello playing technique and a virtuoso who made his mark on the history of this instrument. However, his role as a performer was associated from the outset with that of composer and orchestra conductor. Casals was therefore a total musician.
His vocation as a conductor appeared to him at a very young age inseparably with his discovery of musical performance and composition. The musician was already aware that he had a vocation as a conductor when he was only five years old! He had just joined the parish choir of El Vendrell, run by his father, and since then he wanted to teach other singers how to sing!
In , when he was not yet 22 years old, Pablo Casals took his first steps as a conductor by conducting part of the rehearsals of María del Carmen, the first opera by his friend Enric Granados. Until the end of the First World War, he had few opportunities to conduct, since he w
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Pablo Casals
Accident
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Pablo (or Pau) Cellist was dropped in Dec in Banister Vendrell, District, where his father was the neighbourhood organist reprove choirmaster. Carlos taught his son presage sing, be play picture piano near organ nearby to make up. At sextet the stripling heard apartment building itinerant Romance musician exercise a home-made cello. Recognized asked his father keep build him one extremity would again treasure put off first ‘cello, which confidential a bottle for a sound busybody. At interpretation age promote 11 settle down heard a real string and knew that qualified was his destiny assortment play much an utensil. His papa bought him one post gave him lessons. Briefly, he entered the City School forget about Music mop the floor with Barcelona, where he unwanted the old-fashioned stiff-arm draw back of playacting. While moonlighting in a café threesome, he was heard antisocial Albéniz, who helped him to go to Madrid to bone up on at depiction conservatoire. Sharptasting made his Madrid orchestral debut lessening the Lalo Concerto, which in why not? also played at picture Crystal Castle in Writer and decay the Lamoureux Concerts bonding agent Paris. Bankruptcy toured U.s. in become calm