How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these [cello] suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry," Casals said. "As I got on with the study I discovered a new world of space and beauty... the feelings I experienced were among the purest and most intense in my artistic life!
Interpretation
Pablo Casals emphasizes the emotional depth and beauty found in Bach's cello suites.
In this quote, Pablo Casals expresses his profound appreciation for the emotional richness and poetic quality of Bach's cello suites. He challenges the perception of Bach as 'cold' by highlighting the intense feelings and beauty he discovered through his study of the music, suggesting that true artistry invites deep emotional engagement and reveals a world of beauty and space that resonates with the human spirit.
In practice
During a concert, I might quote Casals to illustrate how deeply music can evoke emotions.
Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.
In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness... I see what people call God in all these things.
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.
I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life.
To the whole world you might be just one person, but to one person you might just be the whole world.
Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.
And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man's thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happening that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.
I live in a country where music has very little success, though, exclusive of those who have forsaken us, we have still admirable professors and, more particularly, composers of great solidity, knowledge, and taste.
It's hard in America as a writer of color, an actor of color, not to get caught up in race and culture. But you're also supposed to be able to write characters and scenes in a way where it's just a matter of fact, a component.
I have all these friends who just love therapy, and I always say the reason that I'm absolutely not in therapy is because then I wouldn't have anything to write.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.
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