Three Facets of Pau Casals\u27 Musical Legacy

Pau Casals (1876-1973, better known to American audiences as Pablo Casals) was a notable Catalan cellist, conductor and composer, also widely known as a humanitarian. He was raised in El Vendrell, a small village in Catalonia (Spain). He went into exile in Prades, France in 1939, towards the end of the Spanish Civil War, subsequently relocating to Puerto Rico in 1957. In October 1945, following the end of World War II, the lack of Allied intervention in Spain ignited Casals\u27 international artistic boycott, wherein Casals vowed not to perform in any country recognizing General Francisco Franco\u27s regime. To date, a group of over thirty biographies stand as rich and authoritative sources on Casals\u27 life and legacy. The biographers, however, tendentiously romanticized Casals\u27 persona by focusing on his musical accomplishments and political activism, providing a popular, yet distorted, image which continues to inform a wide audience of new and senior scholars, performers, music teachers, journalists, concert programmers, and music listeners. While a few scholarly works have touched on some biographical deficiencies (Chaitkin, 2001 and Mercier, 2008), nearly four decades after Casals\u27 death, no definitive scholarly biography exists. This dissertation takes a critical look at three facets of Casals\u27 legacy previously undocumented or misrepresented. Through newly discovered sources, Casals\u27 life is discussed on three dimensions of scale: personal, national and international. The first chapter examines Casals\u27 marriage to Susan Metcalfe illustrating the artist\u27s stratagems to regulate his biographical enterprise. This individual realm reveals the deeply personal nature of Casals\u27 vocal works--at the example of En Sourdine (1904). The second chapter features Casals\u27 entanglements with Puerto Rico\u27s cultural development plan (Operación Serenidad), wherein a neocolonialist lens seemed fitting to observe Casals\u27 musical legacy at a national (Puerto Rico) level. The third chapter covers the later part of Casals\u27 life and focuses on his engagements with the United Nations, the production of the Hymn to the United Nations, and his grandest musical aspiration--to redeem the world through his peace oratorio El Pessebre. At all three levels of analysis, this dissertation demonstrates that Casals enjoyed increasing notoriety through the construction of a positive widespread public image, because he wanted an enduring legacy transcendent of place and time. As an intellectual and cultural product of pre-World War I, however, Casals believed in moral certainty and cultural hierarchy. Being out-of-touch with major social, political and intellectual developments, Casals often served as a carrier of deep-seated social and cultural prejudices. Hence, his legacy is contested and fickle