Bach’s Suites for solo cello in the manuscript copy by Anna Magdalena Bach. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Barcelona, 1890. A thirteen-year-old boy, who arrived two years earlier from El Vendrell to study at the Municipal School of Music, spends his evenings playing the cello in a trio at the Café Tost, seven days a week. One day, out walking with his father, he goes into a second-hand music shop near the port and rummages through the scores. He comes out with a volume printed in Leipzig: the six Suites for solo cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, in the edition by Friedrich Grützmacher. The boy is called Pau Casals, and as an old man he would say that the scene never faded for him.
The story repeated ever since says that Casals rediscovered the Suites. The volume he carried home that day says otherwise. That music had been in print for more than sixty years. The first edition had appeared in Paris around 1824, from Janet et Cotelle, under a title that is already a verdict: Six Sonates ou Études pour le violoncelle solo. In 1826 Dotzauer had edited one in Leipzig for Breitkopf. In 1866 Grützmacher, a cellist from Dresden, had published them with Peters in an openly concert version, with added chords, marked portamenti, recomposed passages and a Courante rewritten from top to bottom. The edition Casals found was Grützmacher’s, and according to the most recent research precisely the concert one: a modern volume, printed by a major German publisher and ending up on the second-hand counter.
The Suites, then, were not lost. Bach’s autograph was missing, that much is true, and still is. Four eighteenth-century copies survive, the best known in the hand of Anna Magdalena, his second wife, another by the organist Johann Peter Kellner, and they diverge from one another in bowings and articulations so often that a definitive text cannot be established. But in nineteenth-century conservatories the music circulated, and some cellists, Grützmacher among the first, had even played a whole suite in public. The French scholar Martin Barré has shown that throughout the century the Suites never stopped being played. What changed was their standing. They were exercises for the fingers, study pieces, at best a salon encore with a piano accompaniment added to make them presentable.
Casals did not find a piece of music. He found a way of taking it seriously. He studied the Suites every day for more than a decade before daring to play one in concert, and when he did he played them as the architecture of a composer speaking alone, without bass and with no one to support him. That is a difference of interpreter, not of archivist, and it is the only one that explains what happened next. The cello repertoire of the twentieth century has been built around these six books, and every cellist who came after, from Rostropovich on down, has had to reckon with Casals’s reading before the score itself.
The recordings came late, and in the middle of a war. In the summer of 1936 the civil war broke up the orchestra Casals had founded in Barcelona, and he took to travelling through Europe, then South America, giving benefit concerts to raise food, clothing and medicine. In the autumn of that same year he went into a recording studio for the first time with the Suites. It was Abbey Road, in London, and he recorded the second and the third. The others followed in Paris, the first and sixth in 1938, the fourth and fifth in 1939, the year he took the road into exile at Prades.
When he walked into Abbey Road Casals was fifty-nine. From the day in the shop near the port, forty-six years had passed.