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?
