What do we really want from music?
A few weeks ago, I was trying to find on Youtube a complete version of the performance the 94-year-old Pablo/Pau Casals gave, at the United Nations in 1971, of the Catalan folksong ‘Song of the Birds’. I was 12 years old at the time, and the performance, which was shown on BBC TV, made a huge impression on me. I wanted to show the video to a friend; even though, frustratingly, I couldn’t find a complete uncut version – only the partial one shown here (maybe there is a complete version, which I’ve missed?) – she was moved by it.
Seeing (part of) it again brought back a rather baffling conversation that I had a few years after the event, in the mid-1970s, with a successful young cellist. I spoke of this performance of ‘Song of the Birds’ with enthusiasm – at which the cellist looked at me in disbelief. ‘If you ask me, it was FOR the birds,’ (ie it was awful), he said. I looked back at him with equal disbelief. ‘But didn’t you find it incredibly moving?” I asked. He shrugged. ‘Yeah – it was touching, of course,’ he replied, as if that were an unimportant side issue. (The conversation must have annoyed me quite considerably, since I remember it so clearly over 40 years later!)
Seeing the performance again now, I still find it so affecting – a man at the end of his life pouring his heart and soul into music that he loves deeply. Of course, at the age of 94, Casals’ mechanical technique and his hearing were not what it had been. Well, who could expect that? One does not expect a 94-year-old to play Sarasate’s Zapateado. But mechanical technique is not all. The true purpose of instrumental (or vocal) technique is to allow us to convey through our performance the music as we hear it in our heads, to tell the story without hindrance. (A fine mechanical technique can actually become a hindrance, if the musician allows it to dictate the interpretation.) Of course, the very sight of Casals playing at that age is moving in itself. But if one listens beyond any imperfections to the way he shapes the phrases, the vitally communicative colours that he can still produce from his cello (sounding like no-one else), one can hear that the true essence of his technique is still intact. He plays the piece slower than he had in former times; but each note is full of direction, a voyage in itself, so that the slow tempo is justified. THAT is what technique is; and to miss that core truth is, I think, to miss the point of why we play music.
