Music: EI Maestro

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What festival audiences heard was an interpretative style completely at the service of the music, and so lucid and apparently effortless that one frustrated critic left a Casals concert complaining that there was nothing to say. Casals had started developing old laws of cello technique and uncovering new ones when he was still in his teens. Before he was through, he had reshaped the general style of modern cello playing with a brilliant series of methodical innovations. By changes of finger positions, for example, he greatly lightened the work of the left hand and increased its mobility; at the same time he led cellists away from the practice of playing constantly with the full bow and taught them how to achieve a finer control of tone.

Casals' favorite cello, which he has used for 50 years, was made by 18th century Violinmaker Carlo Bergonzi (he shied away from a Stradivarius on the ground that it had "too much personality"), and on this instrument Casals brought Bach's unaccompanied suites back into the repertory, uncovered unsuspected dimensions in the sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms, the concertos of Haydn and Schumann.

He played, as one critic remarked, in such a way that every note was either a "forecast" or a "memory." He was not entirely satisfied with his knowledge of a composition, he once told Philosopher Henri Bergson, until he had a physical feeling of a weight "of the pleasant heaviness of gold" sinking into him.

Publicity in Puerto Rico. After Casals decided last December to move to Puerto Rico, his mother's birthplace, he was the object of the kind of noisy publicity that he shrank from all his life. The Puerto Rican government set up a Festival Casals Inc., with a $75,000 budget to promote the festival and the nation's tourist attractions ("Don Pablo, like thousands of visitors, was enchanted with the ... sunbathed beaches and industrial plants, the blue Caribbean presenting a background for tropical flora . . ."). A travel agency booked special bargain-rate festival excursions. The concerts quickly sold out, and as of last week scarcely a room was to be had in San Juan.

Through the uproar Casals quietly went about rehearsals, found time to see friends and admirers who thronged to his pink stone suburban beach house (where he lives with his brother's family). Before his heart attack last week, Casals dispensed advice to an aspiring young conductor ("I hope you will be very well conducted first"), described his perennial stage fright before a public performance ("I don't like to play in public, but I like to give Puerto Rico what God has given me—my art"), registered a protest at modern music ("Perhaps it is an art made by sounds, but not music").