Pablo Casals

Pau Casals i Defilló, known internationally by the Spanish form Pablo Casals, was born on 29 December 1876 in El Vendrell in Catalonia. The son of the parish organist, he began piano at four, took up the cello at eleven, and at thirteen, browsing in a music shop in Barcelona with his father, found a worn copy of Bach's six unaccompanied cello suites — works then dismissed as exercises — that he would study daily for the next twelve years before performing them in public.

His Paris debut in 1899 with the Lamoureux Orchestra under Charles Lamoureux made him at twenty-two one of the most sought-after cellists in Europe. From 1905 to the First World War he toured constantly with the Cortot–Thibaud–Casals Trio. In 1920 he founded the Orquestra Pau Casals in Barcelona and the Associació Obrera de Concerts to bring symphonic music to working-class audiences, and his complete recordings of the Bach suites for HMV — finished in Paris in 1939 — became the foundation of the modern cello repertoire.

After Franco's victory in 1939 he refused to play in any country that recognised the regime, settling in Prades in French Catalonia, where in 1950 he launched the annual Prades Festival on the bicentenary of Bach's death. Resident in Puerto Rico from 1956, he conducted his oratorio El Pessebre (The Manger) on world tour as a hymn for peace and addressed the United Nations in 1971.

He died in San Juan on 22 October 1973 at the age of ninety-six.

The masculine given name Pablo is the Spanish form of Paul, from the Latin Paulus meaning small or humble. He gave it the timbre of a single bow drawing across four strings.