Franco was still in control of Spain, and sadly he lived two years longer than me. Two years after my UN performance, in 1973, I died of old age at home in Puerto Rico. I did not live to see Spain become free again. I was very sad that war had driven me from the land of my birth. But I was very happy, and lucky, because I had loved and played music for more than 90 years.
The Life of Pablo Casals
| 1876 | Pau (Pablo) Casals i Defilló was born in El Vendrell, Catalonia, Spain, on 29th December 1876. He was the second of eleven children. | |
| 1881 | Aged five, Pablo joined a church choir. He had already learnt to play the piano, and soon he could also play the violin. | |
| 1888 | He became a cello student at the Escola Municipal de Música in Barcelona, Spain. He was an excellent student. | |
| 1893 | He moved to Madrid, where he entered the Real Conservatorio de Música y Declamación. He played in the Quartet Society, and gave concerts for the Queen Regent, Maria Cristina. | |
| 1895 | He moved to Paris. He earned a living playing the cello in an orchestra in a musical theatre. | |
| 1896 | Returning to Catalonia, he became a teacher at his old school, the Escola Municipal de Música in Barcelona. He also performed in the orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu. | |
| 1897 | Pablo performed with the Madrid Symphony Orchestra. He received a high honour – the Order of Carlos III – from Queen Maria Cristina. | |
| 1899 | He visited England, where he played a public concert at London’s Crystal Palace, and a private concert for Queen Victoria at her summer palace on the Isle of Wight. Later in the year, he made appeared at the Lamoureux Concerts in Paris. The audience loved him. | |
| 1900 | A concert tour of Spain and Holland with the pianist Harold Bauer was a big success. | |
| 1901 | Pablo crossed the Atlantic for the first time, and played concerts in the United States and South America. | |
| 1904 | He played for the first time at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and then played for President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in Washington DC. | |
| 1914 | In the year that war broke out in Europe, Pablo married the American singer Susan Metcalfe. | |
| 1919 | Pablo set up an orchestra in his home city of Barcelona, calling it Orquesta Pau Casals. It gave its first concert the following year. | |
| 1928 | After 14 years Pablo and Susan decided to end their marriage. | |
| 1936 | General Franco led the Army of Africa into Spain, taking control of Spain’s government. The Spanish Civil War started, lasting until 1939. Pablo hated Franco, and decided to shut down the Orquesta Pau Casals and leave Spain until democracy returned. He moved to France. Franco said he must never return to Spain. He never did. | |
| 1939–1942 | Pablo moved to Prades, in southern France, near to the Spanish border. He performed at different places in southern France and Switzerland. | |
| 1945 | After the war, he felt that Britain and the USA had abandoned Spain. They were too friendly to Franco. Pablo stopped performing. | |
| 1950 | He started conducting and playing the cello again, performing at the Prades Festival. It was organized to celebrate two hundred years since the death of J. S. Bach. Pablo continued to lead the Prades Festivals until 1966. | |
| 1955 | Pablo married his good friend, Francesca Vidal de Capdevila. Sadly, she died in the same year. | |
| 1956 | Pablo moved to San Juan in Puerto Rico. | |
| 1957 | Pablo married his pupil, Marta Montáñez Martínez. | |
| 1958 | He started an orchestra – the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra – and, a year later, a music school, the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico. | |
| 1961 | Pablo performed at the White House again, this time for President John F. Kennedy, who he admired. | |
| 1963 | President Kennedy awarded Pablo the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. | |
| 1971 | Approaching the great age of 95, Pablo performed his Himno a las Naciones Unidas (Hymn of the United Nations) at the General Assembly in New York City. He was awarded the United Nations Peace Medal. | |
| 1973 | Pablo Casals died, aged 96, at home in San Juan, Puerto Rico. |
1901–1971
the American trumpet-player and singer
I was not born into a wonderful world. I grew up in a poor area of New Orleans, where life was tough for young African-American boys. But music saved me, and showed me that the world really was wonderful.
I was born in 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the Deep South of the United States. Two years later, soon after my little sister was born, my father left the family. My mother didn’t want to look after us on her own, so my sister and I went to live with Grandma Josephine. Although we had no toys, no shoes and very little food, my grandmother always sent us to school and to church.
When I was five, my mother returned and we lived with her. It wasn’t a real home though, and I was often on the streets. I needed to earn money to buy food for my mother and sister, so I found a job delivering newspapers. But I started getting into trouble too. New Orleans was a tough city, and you had to join a street gang to survive. One of my jobs as a young member of the gang was to take messages, while another person was watching for enemy gangs outside clubs. I liked standing outside the clubs, because I could hear the music inside. Ragtime music was very popular then.
I found a job with a Jewish family from