Description
In diary entries dating 1926–29, the Viennese music theorist Heinrich Schenker displays a keen interest in Pablo Casals, reflecting on his activities as both a cellist and a conductor. These writings demonstrate a conflicted view. Schenker’s response to Casals’s performance of Bach’s Third Cello Suite was uncharacteristically effusive, commending the cellist’s “incomparable command of the instrument” and “uncommonly strong instinct for synthesis.” That performance not only prompted Schenker to immediately seek out tickets for Casals’s next but also inspired an extended analytical essay on the suite’s Sarabande. That essay includes interpretive suggestions that were in all likelihood inspired by the Casals concert that Schenker so loved.
Yet, despite consistently praising Casals the cello soloist, Schenker took issue with Casals the conductor, characterizing one performance as “shockingly bad, too fast, uninspired, as if he were not the same person who plays the cello.” Schenker was also critical of the cellist’s chamber music performances and what he perceived to be a “business sense” in the way Casals presented himself as a musician, including in an interview published in the Neue Freie Presse.
Although Schenker is today best known for his writings on music analysis, his diaries and correspondence provide a detailed account of concert life and musical broadcasts in Vienna during the early twentieth century. His reactions to Casals’s performances reveal an unexpectedly ambivalent, nuanced perspective on the Catalan musician in terms of his cello playing, conducting, and self-presentation.
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