The Song of the Birds
If you are reading this on the day I am publishing, it is Saint Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day). In many Catholic countries, Saint Stephen’s Day is a public holiday. In Ireland, certainly. As well in Catalonia. I single out Catalonia because below is a link to a very beautiful Christmas carol and lullaby from Catalonia.
A song for peace. Its title is The Song of the Birds, or in the Catalan tongue, El cant dels ocells. It was made famous outside Catalonia by the remarkable Catalan cellist, Pablo Casals. Or Pau Casals in his native tongue. Casals was born on 29th December 1876 in Tarragona, northern Spain, also Catalonia. His father was the organist in a local church. Although he was already playing several other instruments, Casals junior did not begin his studies for the cello until he was eleven years old, which is remarkable given that he is considered one of the modern masters of the instrument.
Here are two recordings of Casals playing this exquisite piece of music. Do listen, they really are very moving. Casals described El Cant dels Ocells as ‘The Soul of My Country: Catalonia’.
He played this music for Peace.
https://www.thestrad.com/video/pablo-casals-performs-the-song-of-the-birds/10365.article
This second recording was performed at the United Nations after forty year’s of silence, of Casals not playing in public. His gesture of silence was his protest against war and fascism. This recording was made when he was in his mid-nineties. He died a year later.
When Casals was thirteen, in 1890, having already decided that he would dedicate his life to the cello, he was with his father in Barcelona. There, in a second-hand music store, Pau made an extraordinary discovery. He found a tattered score copy of the Bach Cello Suites (composed between 1717 and 1723). The Suites were hardly known, infrequently performed, and might well have been lost forever had it not been for Casals. He spent eleven years practising the six suites before he felt ready to perform them in public in 1901. The music sheets he had unearthed had no phrase markings and, because this music was so rarely played, Casals had no references to fall back on or to help him discover how the music was intended to be interpreted. He followed his own knowledge and instincts and the results are sublime.
Casals was the first cellist to record these suites, which he achieved in studios in Paris and London. In London at the Abbey Road studios, where decades later the Beatles recorded many of their timeless classics. Casals took three years from 1936 to 1939 to record all six of the Bach Cello suites. It is entirely thanks to him that these instrumental pieces have been brought to the public’s attention and are celebrated as part of Bach’s immense legacy.
Here is a link to Casals playing the Cello Suites. (Beautifully remastered.) I read that he practised at least one of these pieces every day throughout his long life.
Those three years, 1936 to 1939, were the years of the Spanish Civil War.
During those three shockingly violent years, over one million Spanish lives were lost including one of my own favourite writers, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca who was shot in the back, murdered by Nationalist militia on 19th August 1936, probably on the road between Viznar and Alfacar. Lorca’s remains have never been officially found but some claim that his family – in the dead of night – opened a public grave where many slaughtered Spaniards had been abandoned and took Lorca’s body to a private family grave.
During my researches for my travel book The Olive Tree…
