Talking to musicians or composers has its values, but it seldom adds much to what we know of music. Mozart’s letters to his father give you a few insights into the creative process, but Beethoven’s are merely a peep into his psyche. Of all the composers who have written about their work and that of others, only Berlioz, and perhaps Stravinsky, could impart with any penetration an internal sense of music—and Berlioz’s best commentary was on the art of conducting. So I was not particularly stirred when Newsweek‘s music editor, a busty Texan whose idea of criticism was to shout obscenities over the phone at the Met’s Rudolf Bing, said to me, “If you can take time out when you’re in San Juan from the story you’re doing on Puerto Rico, why don’t you go talk to Pablo Casals? lie’s giving a concert down there.” The “concert” was the Festival Casals—after the Prades Festival, his second major break of a long self-exile from public performance.

My lack of enthusiasm had nothing to do with what I felt about Pablo Casals as a musician. The cello is a cruel and inhuman instrument, and as a boy I had watched a friend’s father—a cellist for the Philharmonic—at practice, his face a reflection of both pain—”the torment,” Casals called practicing—and patience. Casals was then, and in my judgment always will be, Mr. Cello, and in listening to him play it is difficult to separate the man from the instrument. Perhaps, I thought, he might say something memorable, though hardly what might excite Newsweek‘s music editor. But getting to sec him, once I was in San Juan, seemed like an impossibility. He had categorically refused to talk to anyone from the press. He changed his mind when he was told that I was a friend of Luis Muñoz Marin, the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, who had invited Casals to the island and treated him with respect and generosity. “If Toledano is a friend of Don Luis,” Casals said, “I will speak to him.”

When Spain fell to the forces of Francisco Franco, Casals had vowed never to play in public until the Nationalist regime was overthrown. But a dozen or so years later, he had agreed to perform once more—and those of us who loved music were joyed by his decision. He was approaching 80, and though a man of iron constitution, he was not impervious to the treason of time. New recording techniques offered him the opportunity to put on vinyl his own great brand of musicianship and his superlative mastery, both technically and interpretively, of his instrument. He could bring warmth and vitality and empathy to scores that frequently defeated others—the proof to be found in his interpretation of the six Bach Suites for Cello Unaccompanied. These suites are demanding—taxing instrument, performer, and audience. But if it is not lèse majesté to say it, they can sometimes be great room-emptiers. Casals could triumph over this Baroque obstacle course—perhaps because Catalans and Germans have much more in common than either would care to admit.

Casals was living in a small house off the beach at Punta las Arenas, neighbor to San Juan—as a guest of Muñoz and the Puerto Rican government. He was playing the piano as I knocked on his door—a passage from The Well-Tempered Clavier, a daily exercise, he told me, to “refresh the spirit”—and he called out to me in Spanish to enter. But he insisted on speaking to me in English, though he commented on my Spanish name and asked if my family came from Toledo. I was struck by how much this stocky, balding man with a small pot belly, eyes shining through rimless glasses, reminded me of one of my cousins. I asked him, my first question, what had brought about a change of heart—why he was performing once more. “It is always a sacrifice for an artist not to play,” Casals said. Then he looked at the small yellow-and-red Catalan flag on his upright piano and added. “But there are more important things in the world. What right did I have to prosper while my people were persecuted in Spain? And when the war ended, the Spanish people could not understand why they should not be masters of their own destiny. I said this to whoever I thought would listen, even to the King of England. No one listened.” What was more important to Casals, or had been, was his passionate opposition to Francisco Franco and the Nationalists in Spain, and his sorrow that the United States had recognized their government.

Sounding like a character out of Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, he said, “The United States should have more dignity. These dictators do terrible things. They kill. And to kill has no dignity.” Though he was full of admiration for what the British and their government had done during the war to keep alive what he called the “flame of civilization,” he could not forgive Churchill or the Labour government which followed him for not bringing about the fall of Franco—and even speaking well of El Caudillo. “What became of Churchill’s great promises to put an end of fascism everywhere—or to your President Roosevelt’s?” I wanted to talk about music, for I had my own personal and family feelings about Spain which might not accord with his. I respected his assertion that “I possess a moral independence, I am no politician, but an artist who tries to keep faith with his human principles.” But I ventured somewhat into the political when I asked him about Wilhelm Furtwangler, the great German conductor who had gone into exile in protest against Hitler—but who had nevertheless been barred from the United States because of alleged support of the Nazis. Casals placed Furtwangler among the two or three greatest conductors of the time, but felt that he had remained in Nazi Germany a little too long before taking refuge in Switzerland.

“LiCt me tell you,” Casals said. “Furtwangler came to see me in Switzerland just before the Nazi collapse. I told him, ‘Every man to his conscience. You owe me no explanations as to what your true feelings were.’ ‘I am a musician,’ he said. ‘I want to make music’ ‘Be patient,’ I answered him. ‘You are lucky that Switzerland welcomed you.'” Given his own history of exile, I thought this somewhat ungenerous. But what I really wanted was to ask him to describe how he had expanded the range and the capacity of the cello, putting his stamp on the way everyone after him would play it. But the lack of “dignity” of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Churchill was what he wanted to discuss. Ills need for musical performance, which he had sacrificed for years to make a political statement, was very real and very poignant, and he referred to it several times to punctuate his political sentiments. I might have argued, but it would have been in bad taste to challenge his feelings on the Spanish Civil War, so I simply listened. But he too could not limit himself to this, and he turned to what was most important to him as an artist—the music of Bach.

For Casals, Bach was the greatest genius in music, and he more or less paraphrased what I later learned he had written at the time of the Bach Festival at Prades. “The miracle of Bach cannot be found in any other art. To bare human nature until its divinity becomes clear, to make eternal what is ephemeral—to make the divine human and the human divine—that is Bach, the purest and greatest in music of all time.” He had only scorn for those who played Bach as if his compositions consisted of “technical cleverness” when in fact Bach’s music “vibrated with sensitivity. All emotion has been expressed by him.” He paused and smiled. “Bach is a volcano—and a total creature of his music. He was so far ahead of his time that if he returned today, he would be considered a musical revolutionary.”

But Bach was not his only great hero, and during today’s “revival,” what he said about “Papa” Haydn is both significant and incisive. “Haydn had an imagination that knew no end and a marvelous poetic spirit that went along with the solidity of his musical architecture. From our present musical chaos will come, I am sure, a rediscovery of Haydn and a greatness which has been little recognized. He escapes any kind of classification, and his tremendous power of invention, among the greatest of any composer, makes his music a constant surprise. No matter how many times you hear it or play it, you continue to find something new in it.” I said little, but my restraint must have been eloquent because Casals concluded the interview by inviting me to the final rehearsal of the Festival Casals orchestra, which he was conducting. He would be interesting to watch because, though he was not in the highest rank among conductors, he believed that great conducting consisted not only of understanding the music but of an empathy between the orchestra and the man with the baton.

I was the only member of the press present at that rehearsal. How a conductor takes an orchestra through its paces fells you much about his approach to music. The orchestra was running through Mozart’s A Major Symphony, and Casals was happily swinging his baton and his body in time to the music, singing the themes à la Toscanini, though in a much better voice. In the middle of the Andante, Casals suddenly dropped his hand, put down his baton, and painfully began walking off the stage, supported by Alexander Schneider, the concertmaster. Casals was pale and composed, fighting the pain of his heart attack until he was in his dressing room. There he collapsed. They took him away in an ambulance, and as he was carried out on a stretcher, he turned his head to look into the concert hall and said, “Qué lastima, qué lastima, qué maravillosa orquesta.” I had my story, an eyewitness account of an event carried secondhand by the world press, but Newsweek‘s music editor was more interested in the who-shot-John of the Met’s internecine battles, and it never ran.

Pablo Casals did not conduct or play his cello at the Festival Casals, but the peasant strength of his body carried him through, and he returned to recording and concertizing. But that brief encounter with Casals and what today we loosely call charisma had cut deep, and I began listening analytically to his playing and to what he gave to it beyond that musicianly and intuitive translation of a composer’s intent which set him so far above other cellists, and his ability to cut through time and recreate in our contemporaneity the nuances and cadences of an earlier day. No musician respected the composer’s notes and the composer’s intent more than Casals. But he always went beyond this, continuing his study of a score, though he knew it well, in order to reach within the mind and the psyche of the composer. The imagination of the performer had to work symbiotically with that of the composer, perhaps arriving at a new expression. As he remarked, “Sometimes, looking at a score, I say to myself, ‘What marvelous music. But I must make it so.’ The performance must give to the work the full meaning of its existence”—as it filtered through his intuition.

“Interpretation of a work,” he told a friend, “must be something organic, something which makes you know how to vary all repeated passages, how to establish a graduation of detail in the unity of the work—and how to remember two very simple things: that the natural origin of melody was vocal, and that truth rhythms come from the natural movements of man, from steps and the dance.” It was this sense which made his use of the rubato so expressive and so natural—a musical liberty as in speech or in singing. To what he called the “constant fever of thinking,” he counterposed intuition—more important than academic analysis. Casals always had a very strong feeling about performance, and this contributed to what he considered of great importance. “It is not given to everyone to know how to play the first note of a work”—the first call to the listener. It was not, he would say, particularly a question of technique but of sensitivity, too subtle to define. He would have been thoroughly in agreement with critics who maintain that much of a novel’s merit can be perceived in the first paragraph.

Casals brought to the cello not only a superb technique but a whole manner and approach, a sensibility—and this from his early years. The vibrato for him was an instrument of musical delineation and expression, restrained but pronounced in passages that contributed to the melodic enfolding, but in other passages almost nonexistent—the dynamics wide-ranging but with never a sob. Tempo, he believed, should be dictated by the music itself, with the composer’s direction read only as “indications.” Despite his age, he had a greater control of the bow than any other cellist I have heard, the pressure and movement evenly distributed, at heel or tip of the bow, and producing his delicate pianissimo and robust fortissimo—something achieved on the less strenuous but almost as inhuman violin by Isaac Stern, whose bow, fingers, wrist, and arm seem joined together by God. Casals used the whole bow for long notes, but only part of the bow for shorter notes, giving them variety and emphasis, the part of the bow employed being dictated by the meaning of each note. His fingering was something that he developed for himself, and it revolutionized the playing of all cellists.

Virgil Thomson was almost but not quite right when he remarked that cello performance in our time derived exclusively from Casals. But certainly no cellist playing today is not in Casals’ debt. Who else could give us those magnificent musical veronicas? And there was a personal approach in his relationship to his instrument. “I have a great affection for the strings of my cello and I keep them on as long as possible,” he once said. “If one breaks before a concert it worries me because I have to do a lot of preparation in order to learn the characteristics of a new string.”

The records that Pablo Casals made over the years are being reissued one by one on CD, and on those in which he is soloist there is always that calm excellence and that deep understanding of the score—the color and tonal variety and intuition which illuminated whatever he was playing—Bach, Beethoven, Schubert. His preference when listening to his own recordings was, interestingly, to play them at a speed faster than that at which they were recorded—the Bach suites a tone or a tone and a half sharper, with no concern over the resulting difference of keys. But as recorded, those suites still burst forth as exciting commentary, even as he reined in later and more florid compositions. His sense of the winged chariot at his heels made him return to performance, but until his death it seemed as if time had not touched him. As I listen to his recordings, I think of him walking off that stage, forgetting the anguish of his heart but not his dignity. I think of his musical genius and his artist’s simple outlook on the complexities of nations and politics. As a Spaniard, he thought first of dignity, and of the loyalty to whatever it is in a man which makes him an artist. But for the though and the genius and the little Catalan flag, he would not have been Pablo Casals.