Word: barcelona
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pablo's father was the church organist in the town of Vendrell some 40 miles from Barcelona, and the young Pablo grew up with music. He was playing the piano at four, the violin at seven, the organ at nine. At eleven he heard a cello for the first time when a traveling trio visited Vendrell. "I felt as if I could not breathe. There was something so tender, beautiful and human about the sound. A radiance filled...
After a good deal of family argument, little Pablo was marched off by his mother to Barcelona, to study at the Municipal School of Music. In those days, cellists were held in no high esteem. "Ordinarily, I had as soon hear a bee buzzing in a stone jug," wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1894. It was Casals' destiny to change all that, and he began early. At that time, student cellists were taught to bow with their arms close to their sides, even holding a book under their armpits as a method of instruction. Casals tried bowing more freely...
...Rohe, who died four years ago at the age of 83, was by general consent one of the three grand masters of early modern architecture, along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Mies' pure, honed elegance, as seen everywhere in his works, from his famous Barcelona chair (1929) to his glass-curtain walls, has transformed the appearance of every major city on earth. No modern architect has been more widely (or in most cases more clumsily) imitated...
Obsessed already with what he saw as a wretched, horrifying and unjust world, Casals grew terribly pessimistic after violent events in Barcelona on May 1, 1890; he became obsessed with suicide. But, for the next half century, he placed this view of the world in the back of his mind in order to concentrate on the more perfect worlds of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. During this period he revolutionized cello technique. He discovered the magnificence of the six long-neglected Bach suites for unaccompanied cello and brought this music before the public. He became the foremost cellist in the world...
FRANCO SEIZED Barcelona in 1939, and Casals's artistic neutrality ceased. He moved to Prades, in France near the border of Spain, where he helped organize and raise funds for the support of Catalan refugees. His refusal to play concerts in the fascist countries does not seem like a particularly bold or unusual move today, but Casals was one of only a few non-Jewish artists who took such a step. As the war drew to a close, he went on tour again, playing the cello and conducting. This tour came to an abrupt end. Casals had assumed that...