Music: EI Maestro

"It is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful." Thus Pablo Casals once described his cello, an instrument he played with unmatched intelligence, mastery and passion. The analogy to a love affair was apt, for Cellist Casals gave himself to his favorite music (Bach, Mozart) with the sort of evident personal dedication which, as much as his skill, won the world's reverent respect. Last week admirers by the thousands were gathering to honor him at the annual Casals Festival, this year being held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. But for the first time since the festivals began in Prades, France in 1950, El Maestro was not on hand to greet them.

Six days before the festival was to open, while rehearsing his orchestra in the slow movement of Schubert's Fifth Symphony, Pablo Casals, 80, suffered a coronary thrombosis. Doctors, including Boston's Paul Dudley White, summoned to Puerto Rico by Governor Luis Munoz Marin, were optimistic about recovery, hoped that with complete rest he might even be able to play and conduct again in the future. But Casals' friends sadly faced the likelihood that his 'active career as a musician was over.

That long, extraordinary career began in the small, dusty Catalan town of Vendrell, south of Barcelona, where Casals' father was a church organist. By the time the boy was eleven, he had mastered the organ, piano and violin and had turned to the cello and the music of Bach (later he was to begin each of his days by playing a few minutes of Bach's Well Tempered Clavichord). Packed off to Barcelona to study, he played in a gambling casino to support himself. Said one awed casino patron: "He transformed a cage into a concert hall, and a concert hall into a temple." Eventually, Casals attracted the attention of Spain's Queen Mother, Maria Cristina. who invited him to play and compose at the court. Britain's Queen Victoria soon summoned him to London for a command performance. But his early success gave him little contentment. Tormented by the carnage of World War I, he contemplated suicide, finally settled down in the 1920s in Catalonia, where he conducted a first-rate orchestra ("the grandest instrument of them all").

Pilgrims at Prades. During the Spanish Civil War he was a passionate Loyalist. At war's end he exiled himself to "the village of Prades (pop. 5,400) in Southern France, where he spent much of his time and money helping refugees from Franco Spain. For a decade the world heard little of Pablo Casals' music; in 1947 he vowed never to appear in public so long as Franco ruled Spain. When Sir Stafford Cripps invited him to England to explain why Great Britain supported Franco, Casals refused, commented: "He would talk politics; I am talking morals."

His love for Bach finally brought him out of retirement. In 1950, on the 200th anniversary of Bach's death, Violinist Alexander Schneider, a Casals protege, persuaded El Maestro to take part in a Bach festival in Prades. From all over the world famed soloists—Joseph Szigeti. Isaac Stern. Rudolf Serkin—poured into the village on the slopes of the Pyrenees to play with the man Fritz Kreisler had called "the best who draws a bow."