Pablo Casals
CoN, h,°Pening chapters are autobiography, cast with a completely tol;"loral effect in the form of answers to often ridiculously thetlived questions. Although much that is revealed is interesting, 1,144, is a tone of priggish self-righteousness about it that is dis- Ilieeu1. Nobody doulgs Casals's artistic and moral greatness, but dieyPParent self-consciousness of iti as it emerges here, only NINshes our admiration of it. Even if Rimsky-Korsakov, for theilVe, did once say how nervous he was that Casals was in h,4411dience at the first performance of one of his operas, it is for,I ecoming makes him or modest of Casals to tell us so himself, as the
.of b this book do.
ith/se presentation of Casals's views on music and composers is 41allY badly done. A good deal of what he has to say is sound lc, 111°11 sense, but it is mostly made to take the form of knocking Wil '4rio , Aunt Sallies set up by the questioner in quotations from kr4 11s elder French critics, in which they expound their petty 14teclial and national prejudices. Apart from being long out of 54si,even in France, these prejudices are of no more interest 11,1,, (or inside) France than those of English or German critics, W nmid not need Casals's contradiction to expose their stupidity the 4r"v-Mindedness. What is refreshing is his impatience with 4,1110dern cult of 'historical fidelity,' which, as he says, we can in qiquase never authoritatively establish. Since we cannot. we remold interpret and perform Bach not as we think his con- 15113 Aries may have done, but as he seems most real and alive Illi wilv. Otherwise there are few subjects except Spanish music .t4li,,.1ch he has anything really illuminating to say. His personal lie:Iscenees of the famous musicians of his early years are more /10t(itni a, in particular his fascinating portrait of Emmanuel INI„„ 1,e man who gave the keyboard, as the old pun had it, l'oi,„;'''al more')` which reads like an additional chapter to' Beer- 4litiu s Seven Men. Casals considers him a composer of genius, 14r.(311Ps Moor, Tovey and Julius Röntgen, as 'Three Unknown 11110,,e—one of his numerous seemingly cranky opinions that ' 0e worth investigating further. COLIN MASON
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