《白鳥之歌》，台北：志文，1979。台灣至少兩譯本。 Song of the Birds for cello solo/Pablo Casals

 

History’s great cellist, on a beautiful melody...

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Song of the Birds for cello solo/Pablo Casals - Camille Thomas

2021年1月15日 星期五

Joys and Sorrows: Pablo Casals, His Own Story / Reflections by Pablo Casals (1970)，1876 –1973。 《白鳥之歌》，台北：志文，1979

 https://www.facebook.com/hanching.chung/videos/4115998225077620

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Casals' memoirs were taken down by Albert E. Kahn, and published as Joys and Sorrows: Pablo Casals, His Own Story (1970).

《白鳥之歌》，台北：志文，1979

Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals (English)  1970

This book was written by Pablo Casals with the help of Albert Kahn in his 90th year. It includes fascinating commentary on our time and of Casals' own life history. In addition to the text, there are more than 50 pages of unpublished documents, rare musical memorabilia, correspondence, and a portfolio of uniquely intimate contemporary photos of Casals by Albert Kahn.

Pau Casals i Defilló^[1][2] (Catalan: [ˈpaw kəˈzalz i ðəfiˈʎo]; 29 December 1876 – 22 October 1973), usually known in English by his Spanish name Pablo Casals,^[3][4][5][6] was a Spanish (Catalan) and Puerto Rican cellist, composer, and conductor. He is generally regarded as the pre-eminent cellist of the first half of the 20th century and one of the greatest cellists of all time. He made many recordings throughout his career of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, including some as conductor, but he is perhaps best remembered for the recordings of the Bach Cello Suites he made from 1936 to 1939.

*** Pablo Casals認為最多彩的生活：《白鳥之歌》135~54

Casals also became interested in conducting, and in 1919 he organized, in Barcelona, the Pau Casals Orchestra and led its first concert on 13 October 1920. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Orquesta Pau Casals ceased its activities.

**** 

在Joys and Sorrows中，記載指揮Henri Constant Gabriel Pierné (16 August 1863 – 17 July 1937) was a French composer, conductor, pianist and organist. 將此曲總譜摔開，所以 Pablo Casals 拒絕與他演出，從而被告、被罰3000法郎。德布西在場，竟然說：如果你真的想演奏，你就能演奏。

(He succeeded César Franck as organist at Sainte-Clotilde Basilica in Paris from 1890 to 1898. He himself was succeeded by another distinguished Franck pupil, Charles Tournemire. Associated for many years with Édouard Colonne's concert series, the Concerts Colonne, from 1903, Pierné became chief conductor of this series in 1910.

His most notable early performance was the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird, at the Ballets Russes, Paris, on 25 June 1910. He remained in the post until 1933 (when Paul Paray took over his duties).)

External audio
You may hear Pablo Casals performing Antonín Dvorak's "Cello Concerto" with George Szell conducting the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in 1937 Here

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Hans Richter (János Richter) (4 April 1843 – 5 December 1916) was an Austrian–Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor. 告訴他 Pablo Casals Wagner 的專制、壞脾氣。

"Hans Richter was first brought to England by Wagner in 1877 to conduct six operatic concerts in London. The impact made by Richter (then 32 years old) on the capital's orchestral players was enormous. They had never been rehearsed so thoroughly, nor with such discipline as that of a genuine musician rather than a showman; nothing was allowed to slip through as the fundamentals were revisited. Intonation was scrutinised, details brought out, tempi rationalised, notes corrected. His practical knowledge (he played every orchestral instrument) proved formidable and no weak player felt secure. He usually conducted rehearsals and performances of orchestral concerts and operas from memory."

---此君脾氣、品味都很不同於俗人

Emánuel Moór (Hungarian pronunciation: [moːr]; 19 February 1863 – 20 October 1931) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and inventor of musical instruments.

Emánuel Moór Pianoforte from around 1927 by Pleyel et Cie

Anatoly Brandukov, dedicatee of Moór's Cello Sonata, No. 2 in G Major, Op. 55, introduced the composer to Pablo Casals.^[5] Casal's first meeting is recorded in nearly every biography about Casals. In his own words Casals said, “His music was overwhelming….and the more he played, the more convinced I became that he was a composer of the highest order. When he stopped, I said simply, ‘You are a genius.’”^[6] This meeting was the beginning of a long friendship between the two with Casals performing and premiering Moór's compositions, several of which were dedicated to Casals. For example, Casals gave four performances of the Cello Sonata No. 2 in G Major in December of 1905 alone following his initial meeting with the composer earlier in the year. Casals’s first noted performance of this sonata came during a Russian tour (pianist not noted) followed by two performances with Marie Panthès in Geneva and Lausanne and one performance in Paris with Alfred Cortot at the piano.^[7] Casals also championed other of Moór’s works, performing multiple sonatas, a concerto that Moór dedicated to him, a double cello concerto, and a triple concerto for piano trio with orchestra.

***60年的友誼

Elisabeth of Bavaria (25 July 1876 – 23 November 1965) was queen of the Belgians as the spouse of King Albert I, and a duchess in Bavaria by birth.

As queen dowager, she became a patron of the arts and was known for her friendship with such notable scientists as Albert Einstein.^{[citation needed]} During the German occupation of Belgium from 1940 to 1944, she used her influence as queen and German connections to assist in the rescue of hundreds of Jewish children from deportation by the Nazis.^[3] When Brussels was liberated, she allowed her palace to be used for headquarters of the British XXX Corps, and presented its commander General Horrocks with its mascot, a young wild boar named 'Chewing Gum'.^[4] After the war she was awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government.

During the 1950s, the Queen evoked controversy abroad by visiting the Soviet Union, China and Poland, trips that prompted some to label her as the "Red Queen".

Songbirds of  Laeken 此書有主要作者，Pablo Casals 以為是Queen 作的

Ludwig Karl Koch - Wikipedia

In 1937 he made recordings of the birds in the park of the royal castle in La(e)ken (Belgium) with the aid of queen Elisabeth of Belgium. These recordings were published only in 1952, due to the circumstances of war and the Belgian Royal ...

****舊金山富豪家Stein 的子弟/兄妹 Michael，Gertrude and Leo

The source of the Steins’ income was back in California, where their eldest sibling, Michael, had shrewdly managed the business he inherited upon the death of their father in 1891: San Francisco rental properties and streetcar lines. (The two middle children, Simon and Bertha, perhaps lacking the Stein genius, fail to figure much in the family chronicles.) Reports of life in Paris tantalized Michael. In January 1904, he resigned his post as division superintendent of the Market Street Railway in San Francisco so that, with Sarah and their 8-year-old son, Allan, he could join his two younger siblings on the Left Bank. Michael and Sarah took a year’s lease on an apartment a few blocks from Gertrude and Leo. But when the lease was up, they could not bring themselves to return to California. Instead, they rented another apartment close by, on the third floor of a former Protestant church on the rue Madame. They would stay in France for 30 years.

The outbreak of hostilities between Gertrude and Leo coincided with aggression on a global scale. World War I had painful personal consequences for Sarah and Michael, who, at Matisse’s request, had lent 19 of his paintings to an exhibition at Fritz Gurlitt’s gallery in Berlin in July 1914. The paintings were impounded when war was declared a month later. Sarah referred to the loss as “the tragedy of her life.” Matisse, who naturally felt terrible about the turn of events, painted portraits of Michael and Sarah, which they treasured. (It is not clear if he sold or gave the paintings to them.) And they continued to buy Matisse paintings, although never in the volume that they could afford earlier. When Gertrude needed money to go with Alice to Spain during the war, she sold Woman with a Hat—the painting that more or less started it all—to her brother and sister-in-law for $4,000. Sarah and Michael’s friendship with Matisse endured. When they moved back to California in 1935, three years before Michael’s death, Matisse wrote to Sarah: “True friends are so rare that it is painful to see them move away.” The Matisse paintings they took with them to America would inspire a new generation of artists, notably Richard Dieben­korn and Robert Motherwell. The Matisses that Motherwell saw as a student on a visit to Sarah’s home “went through me like an arrow,” Motherwell would say, “and from that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”

With a few bumps along the way, Gertrude maintained her friendship with Picasso, and she continued to collect art until her death, at age 72, in 1946. However, the rise in Picasso’s prices after World War I led her to younger artists: among them, Juan Gris, André Masson, Francis Picabia and Sir Francis Rose. (At her death, Stein owned nearly 100 Rose paintings.) Except for Gris, whom she adored and who died young, Gertrude never claimed that her new infatuations played in the same league as her earlier discoveries. In 1932 she proclaimed that “painting now after its great period has come back to be a minor art.”

In 1907 Leo and Gertrude acquired Matisse’s Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra, which depicts a reclining woman with her left arm crooked above her head, in a garden setting of bold crosshatchings. The picture, and other Matisses the Steins picked up, hit a competitive nerve in Picasso; in his aggressive Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (an artistic breakthrough, which went unsold for some years) and the related Nude with Drapery, he mimicked the woman’s gesture in Blue Nude, and he extended the crosshatchings, which Matisse had confined to the background, to cover the figures. The masklike face of Gertrude in Picasso’s earlier portrait proved to be a transition to the faces in these pictures, which derived from bold, geometric African masks. According to Matisse, Picasso became smitten with African sculpture after Matisse, on his way to the Steins, picked up a small African head in an antiques shop and, upon arriving, showed it to Picasso, who was “astonished” by it.

Music was one of the last Matisses that Gertrude and Leo bought, in 1907. Beginning in 1906, however, Michael and Sarah collected Matisse’s work primarily. Only a world-class catastrophe—the earthquake in San Francisco on April 18, 1906—slowed them down. They returned home with three paintings and a drawing by Matisse—his first works seen in the United States. Happily, the Steins discovered little damage to their holdings and returned to Paris in mid-November to resume collecting, trading three paintings by other artists for six Matisses. Michael and Sarah were his most fervent buyers until the Moscow industrialist Sergei Shchukin saw their collection on a visit to Paris in December 1907. Within a year, he was Matisse’s chief patron.

Portrait of Sarah Stein by Henri Matisse. (SFMOMA, Sarah and Michael Stein Memoral Collection. Gift of Elise S. Haas)

An Eye for Genius: The Collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein

Would you have bought a Picasso painting in 1905, before the artist was known? These siblings did

By Arthur Lubow

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE
JANUARY 2012

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/an-eye-for-genius-the-collections-of-gertrude-and-leo-stein-6210565/