Despite the situation of instability in Spain and the imminent outbreak of the Civil War, Pau Casals continues to make tours in Europe and South America and to give benefit concerts to raise funds for food, clothing and medicine. After a short stay in Paris at the home of Maurice Eisenberg, Casals goes to the Catalan town of Prades and takes up residence in a room of the Grand Hotel, from where he will begin his campaign of aid for the Spanish refugees, together with his friend, the poet Joan Alavedra.
Just when the passengers are about to board, the Champlain is bombed by German aircraft and the group decides to return to Prades, where Pau Casals settles with Francesca Capdevila and the Alavedras in Villa Colette.
Pau Casals begins to set it to music. After a week of concerts in England, Casals decides not to play again in this country in protest against the Allied countries' immobility with respect to General Franco's regime. He decides not play again in public as long as the democracies do not change their attitude with respect to the Franco regime, and his second exile in Prades begins. In the next four years he devotes himself to composing, to giving cello lessons and, above all, to helping the Catalan and Spanish refugees.
At the initiative of Alexander Schneider, on 2nd June begins the first Prades Festival, the Bach Festival, in commemoration of the bicentennial of the great composer's death. Between this time and , he will hold master classes in interpretation here each year.
The festival management decides to hold the first Casals Festival of Puerto Rico in tribute to Pau Casals himself, under the direction of Alexander Schneider. Pau Casals is appointed president of the latter. The concert, together with the peace message that Pau Casals had recorded a few days earlier in Geneva, is broadcast by radio to over 40 countries, turning Casals into a symbol of the struggle for world peace. When political and egotistical pursuits caused conflicts between his fellow men, however, Casals fought for peace by silencing that beauty.
At the height of his artistic prowess he remained in exile, his cello quiet. Nobel Prizewinning writer Thomas Mann, quoted by Bernard Taper in Cellist in Exile: A Portrait of Pablo Casals, believed Casals's art was "allied to a rigid refusal to compromise with wrong, with anything that is morally squalid or offensive to justice.
Casals was born on December 29, , in the seaside town of Vendrell, located in the Catalonian region of Spain. As a child he was surrounded by music. According to H. Kirk, author of Pablo Casals: A Biography, "The atmosphere of music cradled Casals's earliest fantasies; much later he spoke of being bathed in it all the time.
By the age of four, Casals was playing the piano. The following year he joined the church choir. A year later he was composing songs with his father, and by the age of nine he had learned how to play the violin and organ. When he was 11, Casals decided to study the cello after having seen the instrument in a chamber music recital. Though his father wanted him to apprentice to a carpenter, his mother insisted he follow his inclination toward music, enrolling him in the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona, Spain.
The young Casals disagreed with the technical constraints advocated by his instructors, preferring to bow and finger the cello in his own manner. His progress was extraordinary, however, and soon Casals's revolutionary techniques had exposed "a range of phrasing, intonation, and expressiveness that had not previously been thought possible, and [made] the cello an instrument of high purpose," Taper noted in Cellist in Exile.
In Casals traveled to Madrid and gave informal concerts for the queen and her court. Over the next few years, his reputation spread as he played with various orchestras in Paris and Madrid.
With his formal debut as a concert soloist in Paris in —where he appeared with the prestigious orchestra of French conductor Charles Lamoureux—Casals's career was assured. What audiences heard in Casals's playing was a suffused reverence for everything around him. His numerous benefit concerts, his commitment to humanitarian actions and his various speeches at the United Nations characterized him clearly as a man of peace.
His remains now rest in the cemetery of El Vendrell. Museum: museu paucasals. His father bought him one and gave him lessons. Subsequently, he entered the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona, where he rejected the old-fashioned stiff-arm way of playing. He toured America in and in went to live in Paris where, with Alfred Cortot and Jacques Thibaud, he established a trio that would last until For more than three decades Casals toured the world as a leading cello soloist.
When he returned to Barcelona from Paris in , he recognised the need for a local symphony orchestra. In setting up the Orquesta Pau Casals, he risked his own hard-earned fees by subsidising it for the first decade of its existence.
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