"I have never been much taller than my cello," Pablo Casals once remarked. He spoke more modestly than he knew. For in the history of music, Casal's cello stands very tall indeed. Most musicians would agree that he was the greatest cellist ever to play that awkward instrument. More than that, he was a humanist who refused to compromise or adjust in an age of compromise and adjustment. "We are before anything men," he said, "and we have to take part in the circumstances of life. Who indeed should be more concerned than the artist with the defense of liberty and free inquiry, which are essential to his very creativity?"
Nobody before had played the cello the way Casals did. He spent hours on a single phrase, days and weeks on a single movement, whole years on the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, which he was the first cellist ever to perform in their entirety. "People say I play as easily as a bird sings. If they only knew how much effort their bird has put into his song." He may have worshiped the masters, but once onstage he insisted on meeting them as an equal, employing powerhouse accents, theatrical contrasts and a ruddy tone with an infinite variety of shadings.
Pablo's father was the church organist in the town of Vendrell some 40 miles from Barcelona, and the young Pablo grew up with music. He was playing the piano at four, the violin at seven, the organ at nine. At eleven he heard a cello for the first time when a traveling trio visited Vendrell. "I felt as if I could not breathe. There was something so tender, beautiful and human about the sound. A radiance filled me."
After a good deal of family argument, little Pablo was marched off by his mother to Barcelona, to study at the Municipal School of Music. In those days, cellists were held in no high esteem. "Ordinarily, I had as soon hear a bee buzzing in a stone jug," wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1894. It was Casals' destiny to change all that, and he began early. At that time, student cellists were taught to bow with their arms close to their sides, even holding a book under their armpits as a method of instruction. Casals tried bowing more freely and also began experimenting with the fingering of the left hand, which in the old tradition used to zip up and down the finger board like a yoyo. The changes may seem trivial, but these techniques revolutionized both the playing of the cello and its stature as a solo instrument.
Few prodigies have had better luck. At 16 he was introduced to Count Guillermo de Morphy, a patron of the arts and adviser to Spain's Queen Maria Cristina. The count tutored Casals in several languages and presented him to the Queen, who was an enthusiastic pianist. Soon the Queen and the young cellist were playing duets together.
In 1899 Count de Morphy sent him to see the French conductor Charles Lamoureux. Gruff, distracted, crippled, Lamoureux rose at the first sounds from Casals' cello, limped toward the young artist, and embraced him, saying: "You are one of the elect." Casals was then 22, and from then on, he had it made. He played for Queen Victoria, the King and Queen of Portugal, and became an intimate of Belgium's Queen Elisabeth (she played violin to his cello).