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Pablo Casals
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Pablo Casals was born in 1876 in El Vendrell, a small Catalan town where his father, Carles Casals, was the parish organist and choirmaster, and gave him his first piano and singing lessons at four. At eleven he saw a cello played for the first time, at a trio concert in the town's Catholic center, and was enrolled within the year at Barcelona's Municipal School of Music under the very cellist he'd heard, José García. Two years into that training, in a Barcelona sheet-music shop, thirteen-year-old Casals found a battered edition of Bach's six unaccompanied Cello Suites and began a private study that outlasted both teachers: over a decade of daily practice before he performed one in public, and, decades later, the first complete recording anyone had made of them.
the sound in question
1936
Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007: I. PréludePablo Casals
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Johann Sebastian Bach1720s · Baroque / Classical
In a Barcelona sheet-music shop in 1890, thirteen-year-old Casals found what he later called "a sheaf of pages, crumbled and discoloured with age" — Bach's six suites for solo cello, in a heavily altered 1866 edition by the German cellist Friedrich Grützmacher. Neither García nor anyone else in his circle had heard of them; cellists who knew the suites at all treated them as technical exercises, unfit for the stage. Casals practiced them daily and told almost no one, working in private for twelve years before he played one in public.
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1717
Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 — PréludeJohann Sebastian Bach
1936
Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007: I. PréludePablo Casals
listen forThere's no earlier recording to point to: Bach died over a century before recorded sound existed, and Casals himself made the first complete recording of the suites, in sessions in London and Paris between 1936 and 1939 (after cutting a partial set in 1915). Listen to how unhurried this 1936 Prélude is — no rush through the arpeggios, a singing pull against the beat rather than a metronomic one, the sound of a piece practiced privately every morning for over a decade before it ever reached an audience.
Carles CasalsClassical / Sacred music
Before Casals ever touched a cello, his father put him through years of formation: Carles Casals, organist and choirmaster in El Vendrell, taught him piano and organ from age four, then singing and solfège, and had him in the parish choir loft absorbing Gregorian chant before he could read a full sentence. The Fundació Pau Casals chronology records the pair collaborating on a score for a Christmas shepherds' play performed in his father's church. One early biographer credited this training, not the cello lessons that came later, with giving him what he called "the solid base of his entire musical education."
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No known recordingCarles Casals
El Cant dels Ocells (Song of the Birds)Pablo Casals
listen forNo recording of Carles Casals survives — provincial Catalan church organists in the 1880s predate commercial sound entirely. Listen instead to "El Cant dels Ocells" ("Song of the Birds"), the traditional Catalan carol Casals kept as a signature closing encore for the rest of his career. Its melody moves in the stepwise, modal phrases of plainchant rather than virtuoso figuration — the same unhurried, vocal shaping his father drilled into him in the choir loft at El Vendrell, back when singing came before the cello.
José GarcíaClassical
García's own trio came through El Vendrell to play at the Catholic center, and it was the first time Casals ever saw a cello in a musician's hands. One early biography records him turning to his father on the spot — "Father, do you see that instrument? That is what I want to play!" — and within the year he was enrolled at Barcelona's Municipal School of Music as García's pupil. Casals outgrew him fast: within three years the student was already loosening the stiff bow arm and cramped posture García had taught him, rebuilding the technique from the ground up.
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No known recordingJosé García
1915
Le Cygne (The Swan)Pablo Casals
listen forNo recording of José García survives; his teaching career in Barcelona ended around 1896, just before commercial disc recording reached Spain. Casals's 1915 Columbia recording of Saint-Saëns's "Le Cygne" stands in for what García's training actually sounded like: a long, unbroken bow stroke and a singing, vibrato-warmed tone built for salon and parlor repertoire. It's the conservatory polish García instilled — before Casals took it apart and rebuilt the technique underneath it.