A Reunion of Hearts

In Prades' Church of St. Pierre in the French Pyrenees, every pew, aisle and choir stall was crammed with hushed listeners. As the last tones of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cantata for Soprano and Bass, No. 32 floated away, there was silence. Then, in an unexpected gesture, the tall, white-haired Bishop of Perpignan arose, raised his hands and gave the first clap, signaling an end to the church ban on applause. As bald little Pablo Casals bowed from the podium, the 2,000 listeners clapped so thunderously that a piece of plaster shook loose from the high roof, clattered into the church.

Bow & Baton. Last week Prades' great three-week Bach festival (TIME, June 12) was over. But the feeling of it still lingered on. It had been "a reunion of hearts," 73-year-old Pablo Casals told a farewell gathering of his friends. The musicians who had come to play with and listen to Bach's most famed modern interpreter enthusiastically agreed.

Casals' simple but masterfully eloquent performance of the six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello had moved the most undazzled of them to tears. When he put down his cellist's bow and took up the baton, he had called forth a fresh new spirit from the weariest fingers. With perfectionist Casals sitting before him in the audience, scholarly Pianist Rudolf Serkin had played through Bach's Goldberg Variations with a power and precision that transfigured Casals' round face.

By the time the festival was over, some of the musicians had decided to stay on indefinitely. Tall, pretty U.S. Cellist Madeleine Foley was canceling most of her engagements in order to remain. Said she: "Why should I go home and play when he may die some day? I'm going to stay here as long as I can borrow the money." Young Pianist Eugene Istomin was renting a villa so that he could study with Casals until next December.

A Door in the Walls. Those who were going home would take with them unforgettable memories of Prades and the little man who, to honor Bach, had broken his vow not to play in public again until Franco's government had been ousted from his native Spain. Said Oboist Marcel Tabuteau: "It is not possible to believe what Casals does with a bow. There has never been anyone like him." For voluble young Violinist Isaac Stern, Casals had "opened a door in the walls--our conventional conceptions of music--and showed us how we can go beyond without losing respect for the music itself." What he would remember most was "the meeting with a man, and the relation of this man to his art. This was wonderful."

It seemed unlikely that Pablo Casals' exile would ever be lonely again. He had already agreed to preside over another festival next year. For each and all the visitors, he had a heartfelt "Thank you, thank you, it was wonderful, wonderful."

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