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.
The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.
Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.
Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
I think the way kids create is so inspiring. They're drawing a picture? They love the picture they drew; they're not tortured about it.
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