The Exile of Prades

Almost every morning at 8, a tubby little old man in baggy pants, a wool shirt and a brown pullover sweater emerges from the concierge's cottage of the Chateau Valrac in the sleepy little Franco-Spanish border town of Prades. Usually, with his huge German shepherd dog Follet trotting alongside, he walks down the road toward the beautiful medieval Abbey of St. Michel de Cuxa, or toward the Canigou, the mountain which lies near the Catalonian border. He seldom heads toward the center of the town; the townspeople of Prades are inordinately proud of Pablo Casals, the great musician who lives among them in self-exile, and he would have to shake the hand of everyone he met.

For eleven years, world-famed Catalan Cellist Casals has lived his life of simple but defiant exile in Prades. When he came to Prades, it was with a vow that he would never play again in his native Spain so long as Dictator Francisco Franco was in power. Then, soon after World War II, he decided not to play any more in public at all.

"This Once." At 73, his life is nonetheless full of music. After his morning walks he goes to the new grand piano sent to him by an admiring music lover of Buffalo, N.Y. "As I have done all my life long," he begins his musical day with preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach.

He is composing some, teaching a good deal; pupils come to him from all over the world. Above all, he had never neglected his cello, or the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello which he lifted from musical obscurity 50 years ago and brought to their true glory by the lofty simplicity of his playing.

Last week, his blue eyes twinkling with enthusiasm and excitement, Pablo Casals was practicing with a new will and fervor. To honor the great Bach himself on the sooth anniversary of the composer's death, he had agreed to play in public just once more. Said he last week: "I am not coming out of retirement. I decided to play here this once, in spite of my retirement."

"Great Pain." He had gotten invitations to other bicentennial Bach festivals in Europe and the U.S. Among them: bids to play in Strasbourg with the great Bach organist, Albert Schweitzer, and in Leipzig's venerable Thomas-Kirche, where Bach himself had been cantor. He had turned them all down, although "It gave me great pain to refuse."

The insistent urging of his pupil, U.S. Violinist Alexander Schneider, had finally moved Casals to agree to play "in the town of my exile." Next June, in the Cathedral of St. Pierre, Casals will lead an orchestra largely recruited among U.S. musicians. Violinists Schneider, Joseph Szigeti and Isaac Stern, Pianists Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Rudolf Serkin and Casals himself will be among the soloists. When the festival is over, Cellist Casals plans to return to his self-imposed silence.

"Greatest Sacrifice." In a world that has forgotten much and forgiven more, Pablo Casals has forgiven and forgotten nothing. The French, when they made him a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, said of him: "He is a conscience of our time."

He will not play in Britain or in the U.S., where he last toured in 1928, because "I consider that we owe to England and America the situation in Spain . . . They abandoned us."

Cellist Casals had explained that view before. He felt that his deeper decision, not to play anywhere, had never been made as clear as he wanted it to be. Last week he put it succinctly: "It is because I think it is immoral that people have forgotten that the German war cost about 30 million lives and the suffering that still exists now ... It is the greatest sacrifice of my life I am making. But someone must remember. Someone."

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