Pau Casals wrote letters as he played the cello: with conviction and exacting care. An epistolophile to the core, he wove a web of correspondences through what Eric Hobsbawm called the “short 20th century,” an era of war and upheaval that shattered the 19th century’s bourgeois order. His letters, exchanged with a fluid cast of cultural and political figures, remain a crucial record of these convulsions. Their voices are woven into the broader fabric of history, both cross-section of and testament to a fractured epoch.
Now, for the first time, this correspondence appears in full, published by Acantilado, the Spanish press known for its musical catalog and philological rigor. Querido Maestro, edited by Anna Dalmau and Anna Mora, reconstructs Casals’s life letter by letter, assembling fragments into a coherent whole. Of the many biographies of him, the most notable remain Josep Maria Corredor’s Pau Casals (1967), a Spanish classic, and Robert Baldock’s Pablo Casals (1992), the first full-length portrait since the cellist’s death. Neither, however, brings us as close to him as these pages.
Casals claimed he was a slave to letter-writing, a habit that occupied three or four hours of each day. After the Spanish Civil War, exile made it a necessity. A committed Republican and Catalan nationalist, he opposed Franco’s regime and, when Barcelona fell in 1939, refused to return. Writing became his lifeline to a world he had left behind but still carried within himself. Emotionally and culturally, he remained tied to that past, championing local composers and speaking of his hometown near the Mediterranean in Tarragona with undiminished affection: “I have found comfort in the fact that the little boy from Vendrell has never abandoned me,” he once said.
His correspondence spanned the world, including musicians such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alfred Cortot alongside statesmen like John F. Kennedy. Yet for all the distances they covered, these letters also reveal the enduring pull of those closest to him. Some of the most affecting exchanges—moving precisely because they lay bare the contradictions, preoccupations, and tentative appeals of a self—are infused with the warmth that only kindred bonds can foster. They provide an unguarded glimpse into his inner life, marked by the urgent need to understand what had happened to Spain during and after the fascist takeover, and to discover how to live with dignity as an artist and as a human being.
Casals embodied a spiritual humanism, akin to that of Renaissance scholars for whom preserving texts, traditions, and ideas represented defiance against oblivion. Beauty and tradition, carefully cultivated as resources for the present, were acts not of retreat but resistance. It is precisely this immediacy that my translations from the Spanish strive to capture. My aim is to give voice to the world that formed Casals as both musician and political figure. The value of these letters lies in the attention they pay to concerns that, while local, are never secondary.
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