Thursday, November 13, 2014

The Soft Dust of Time

I had read the book, Joys and Sorrows, a biography of Pau Casals, and every cellist has seen the pictures: the aged cellist walking arm in arm with his young wife, Martita, on the beach. Then I moved to Puerto Rico, and went to the museum in his honor in Old San Juan; there, I peered at the memorabilia, watched a few tapes of the old Casals Festivals, and especially, peered through the Plexiglas case at his cello.
Well, one of his cellos, since Wikipedia has confirmed what I remembered: Casals played at least two Gofrillers throughout the course of his career. The instrument I remember was a Vuillaume: not quite a Gofriller, but still a very distinguished French luthier of the 19th century.
“What were those evenings like,” I would ask Mr. Fernández decades ago—what cellist wouldn’t want to know what the early Casals Festivals had been like? Back when it was a festival, instead of what it has now become, which is a two-week concert series of orchestras, chamber groups, and the obligatory cellist brought in. Yes, the concerts can be excellent, but…
“…in the old days, all the great musicians would come, stay, spend several weeks, give master classes. Best of all, you could go to the rehearsals—that’s when I heard my first Messiah. Beverly Sills, Alicia de Larrocha, Alexander Schneider—they all came. And since it was held at UPR Theater, I could walk through town and attend the rehearsals. It was magical….”
Nor was he alone; it was what everyone said who remembered those days. And the festival was hardly the most important thing that Casals did for music in Puerto Rico—he also founded or helped found the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico.
Casals died in 1973, in the year of the deaths of the three great Pablos: Casals, Picasso, and Neruda. And what had happened since then?
Let me tell you a melancholy fact, dear Reader: however great you were in life, in death you take your chances. Or, rather, the dust of the passing years settles softly on all your accomplishments and fame. Casals will always be revered as a cellist, a composer, and especially as a man. But the politicians? The people who direct public policy? The bureaucrats who assign the funds? Many of them were not yet born on that day when Casals died.
I tell you that because I have just walked the two blocks to where the Casals Museum once was and should be. And what did I see? An abandoned building, as I knew I would. Because I had bumped into the directors of the museum a couple of years ago; we had chatted, and they had told me that the instrument—the presumed Vuillaume—of the Museum had been restored by my friend Rodrigo Correa, who had laid down the law: that instrument was never going back to that site. Where is it, instead? Apparently, for reasons I’ve now forgotten, somewhere in Texas.
And the rest of the collection? Scattered, since, well, here’s the official explanation, from El Nuevo Día of August on 2013:
“El Museo Pablo Casals nunca ha cerrado sus puertas al público, lo que pasa es que el deterioro del antiguo edificio en la Calle San José (el Viejo San Juan) afectaba. La casa parecía una casa fantasma y nosotros no podíamos hacer nada, porque el edificio es del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña”, puntualizó
(“The Pablo Casals Museum has never closed its doors to the public, what happens is (sic) the deterioration of the old building in Old San Juan on San José Street was affecting it. The house seemed like a ghost house and we could not do anything, since the building belongs to the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.”)
Yeah?
To a bureaucratic mind, this may make sense, but to the rest of us? And what did Casals’ wife think? Because after I had watched a documentary of Casals on YouTube, I had become interested in Martita Casals Istomin; for one thing, she was obviously a very talented cellist who had stopped playing—at least publically—and devoted herself to Casals. She later married the pianist Eugene Istomin, and had been at various times the Artistic Director of Kennedy Center and the president of the Manhattan School of Music. And as you can see in the clip below, the years have faded neither her beauty nor her charm.
Well, in the course of the clip, the name of Casals’ good friend Emanuel Moór was mentioned—and I wondered: could it be? Because I had grown up hearing about Moór, but not as a composer, but as the inventor of the double keyboard piano—of which my mentor, Gunnar Johansen, had had two. One—was it the Bösendorfer?—had lived upstairs, the other had been in the basement studio. The sound of those pianos still rings in my ears.
So it was time to check out Moór, of whom Casals had thought highly. The cellist Steven Isserlis apparently didn’t think much of him, and no one will ever say that the composer is played ad nauseum. But is there anything there? YouTube, of course, held the answer.
It came in the form of a double cello concerto, written for Casals and his first wife, the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia. And it’s so rare that the first movement has had only 531 hits. Oh, and the “orchestra” is in fact a piano reduction, though the soloists are excellent.
Two dead cellists; two old friends; a widow twice over; a closed museum; a cello in exile, in Texas….

Is that why this music sounds so evocative?

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