Orquestra Pau Casals

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The Orquestra Pau Casals (OPC) was a symphony orchestra founded and directed by Pau Casals in Barcelona. The orchestra worked in Barcelona from 1920 to 1936. During these years it performed numerous works from the classical and contemporary music repertoire in the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona. In the 17 years of its existence, the orchestra has developed into one of the leading ensembles in Europe from an artistic point of view.

plan

In 1919, Pau Casals had the idea of ​​creating a top orchestra in Barcelona that could perform both the classical repertoire and contemporary music at the highest level in the city, similar to the orchestras that he performed as a soloist in the The United States . This orchestra should also attract the best soloists in the world to the city. As a musician, Casals himself was dependent on the musical life of his homeland and wanted to raise it significantly. A first attempt to improve the situation with the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona failed because of its underfunding and the lack of organization and working methodology.

founding

Pau Casals founded the new orchestra in 1920 with violinists Enric Casals , Enric Ainaud and cellist Bonaventura Dini, among others . At the same time, he set up a board of trustees headed by Josep Soldevila , which, among other things, regulated financial matters. The Count of Labern, Carles Vidal-Quadras , Francesc Cambó , Claudi Sabadell , Jeroni de Moragues , Lluís Guarro and Felip Capdevila completed this governing body. Right from the start, the orchestra managed without public grants or funding. Casals provided the orchestra with money from his work as a musician and did not take any wages for his artistic direction. The members of the board of trustees also supported the orchestra financially and in return received an annual concert conducted by Casals.

Casals hired 88 musicians, 66 of whom also belonged to the Orquestra Simfònica del Gran Teatre del Liceu . He paid the musicians all the same and started straight away with “hard orchestral work”, which also included aspects such as tuning the instruments. This serious orchestral work was unusual in the Barcelona orchestras of the time. As leader in this initial phase, Pau Casals managed to create a climate of passion among the musicians in which everyone gave himself up to the common cause and took responsibility for his or her contribution. Joaquim Pena became the orchestra's general secretary. On October 13, 1920, the orchestra gave its first concert in the Palau de la Música Catalana . The program included works by Johann Sebastian Bach , Ludwig van Beethoven , Maurice Ravel and Franz Liszt .

The project envisaged two series of 10 concerts for a total of twenty concerts per season. Ten of these concerts took place in the autumn before the Gran Teatre del Liceu season began , and the remaining ten in the spring after the Gran Teatre season ended. With this organization, the orchestra members, who were playing in the ensemble of the Gran Teatre del Liceu at the same time , were not brought into time and operational conflicts.

Active phase

At the beginning of the project, the Barcelona music world paid little attention to the new orchestra. However, the orchestra solidified in a short time and reached a high artistic level. This made it possible to perform complex works that had not yet been performed in Barcelona, ​​such as Bach's great oratorios, the Seasons and the Creation by Haydn (1932), Davide penitente by Mozart (1933), a mass by Franz Schubert or the psalm symphony by Igor Stravinsky as well as the Missa solemnis , the Ninth Symphony and Christ on the Mount of Olives by Beethoven. The orchestra worked with the Orfeó Gracienc and Orfeó Català choirs to perform major choral works .

Working in Barcelona

Casals and the orchestra increasingly attracted international soloists. The following artists have performed with the orchestra: Gaspar Cassadó (from 1921 several times), Wanda Landowska (1921), Alfred Cortot (1922, 1927, 1929, 1933), Alfredo Casella at the piano (1922), Mieczysław Horszowski , Elisabeth Schumann ( 1923), Blanche Selva (1926), Jacques Thibaud (1927, 1929), Eugène Ysaÿe (in his last appearance as a soloist in Beethoven's violin concerto), Horace Britt , Harold Bauer (1927), Donald Francis Tovey (1927 and 1928), Charles Panzera , Ildebrando Pizzetti , Baltasar Samper , Robert Gerhard (1931), Joan Manén , Arnold Schönberg (1932), Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Pierre Fournier (1934). The famous Lied singer Conxita Badia took part in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and she appeared with the orchestra more than thirty times.

The orchestra conducted, among others, Adrian C. Boult , Serge Koussevitzky (1922), Béla Bartók , Richard Strauss , Igor Stravinski , Max von Schillings (1925), Alexander von Zemlinsky , Manuel de Falla (1926), Eugène Ysaÿe (1927), Joaquín Turina (1928), Alfredo Casella (1929), Vincent d'Indy (1930), Ernesto Halffter , Ildebrando Pizzetti (1931), Anton Webern (1931, 1936), Arnold Schönberg (1932), Enrique Fernández Arbós (1932, 1935) , Fritz Busch (1933, 1934), Joaquim Zamacois , Jaume Pahissa i Jo , Enric Morera , Joaquim Serra , Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1934), Ernest Ansermet , Hermann Scherchen (1936) and Arthur Honegger .

In addition, musicians such as Eduard Toldrà , Joan Lamote de Grignon , Emili Vendrell , Mercè Plantada , Emili Sagi-Barba , Alexandre Vilalta , Blai Net and Concepció Callao regularly cooperated with the orchestra.

The orchestra gave premieres of the following composers: Juli Garreta ( Les illes Medes , 1923; Concert per a violí i orquestra , 1925), Jaume Pahissa i Jo ( Sinfonietta , 1921; Monodia , 1925; Suite intertonal , 1926), Manuel Blancafort ( El rapte de les sabines , German: “The robbery of the Sabine women”) and Pau Casals himself wrote the Sardana per a 32 violoncels (1929). The world premiere of the Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments by Manuel de Falla in 1926 was performed by five musicians from the Pau Casals Orchestra under the direction of the composer. In 1936 Manuel de Falla premiered the concert for violin and orchestra "In memory of an angel" by Alban Berg.

Working outside of Barcelona

The orchestra also performed outside of the Palau de la Música , e.g. B. in Barcelona in 1925 in the Coliseum and in the Gran Teatre del Liceu , in 1926 in the Teatre Circ Olympia . On April 15, 1931, the orchestra for the proclamation of the republic gave a concert with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the Palau Nacional de Montjuic . In 1934 the orchestra gave a concert by the city of Barcelona in honor of Pau Casals at the same location. It also appeared in smaller towns in Catalonia such as El Vendrell , the birthplace of Casals, in 1927 . In May 1924, the orchestra performed in the Paris City Hall and in the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in Paris. Attempts to hold concerts in the rest of Spain e.g. B. to give in Seville or in other countries (South America) failed. In a reply to Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1933 , Pau Casals categorically ruled out appearances in National Socialist Germany for himself as a soloist, but probably also for the orchestra.

Working in the social

Since 1926 the orchestra has played for the Associació Obrera de Concerts (German: Workers' Concert Association) founded by Pau Casals . The aim of this organization was to give workers and the less educated classes access to classical and contemporary music. For a small annual fee of six pesetas, participants could subscribe to and attend six concerts a year (always on a Sunday morning).

These concerts, actually reserved for the orchestra partners, achieved great success and helped make the music accessible to an audience that had previously had no access to this area of ​​culture. Such events also had a socially integrating effect. Casals himself commented on the success of these special concert series as follows: "The recognition of these workers meant more to me than any applause I had ever received." This social concept of Casals' was later copied in numerous other cities.

The End

During the years of the republic, the Generalitat de Catalunya intended to transform the orchestra into a national orchestra as Orquestra de Catalunya . The beginning of the Spanish Civil War prevented this. In 1936 the orchestra was to open the Olimpíada Popular de Barcelona , the so-called People's Olympiad and the official counter-event to the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics in the Teatre Grec of Barcelona, ​​at which Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was to be performed. During the public rehearsals in the Palau de la Música , news of the military uprising of July 18, 1936 became public. Casals told how the orchestra, the soloist Conxita Badia and the Orfeó Gracienc choir then interpreted the last movement of the Beethoven symphony as a song of peace in front of empty seats . The actual concert never took place. The ensuing civil war and the repression of Catalan culture during the Franco dictatorship prevented the orchestra from returning or re-establishing itself. Its founder and director Pau Casals went into exile a little later in Prades in southern France . Thus the public history of Orquestra Pau Casals ended in July 1936.

Testimonies

There are several recordings with the Orquestra Pau Casals . A known recording from June 1929 are the Double Concerto of Johannes Brahms with Pau Casals on the cello and Jacques Thibaud on the violin under the direction of Alfred Cortot again.

literature

Web links

Individual references and comments

  1. ↑ This article is based on the article of the same name on the Catalan Wikipedia. The versions of the Catalan-language article are imported later.
  2. ↑ Note on the literature: Pepe Reche Antón points out in the quoted article of the Revista Catalana de Musicologia (2018) about the cast of the horn group of the orchestra that to date no monograph on the “Orquestra Pau Casals” exists: The topic is in Biographies on Pau Casals either dealt with or left out. In some biographies this topic unfortunately takes on "anecdotal traits". The violinist Enric Casals, the brother of Pau Casals and co-founder of the orchestra, also pointed out this partly anecdotal and historically and scientifically incorrect treatment of the topic in secondary literature (statement by Pepe Reche Antón). Pepe Reche Antón then qualifies among the more recent Casals biographies those of HL Kirk and Robert Baldok with regard to the subject of Orquestra Pau Casals as probably reliable from a musicological point of view , whereas he considers the biographies of Josep Maria Corredor (here also as a source, but not as the sole source in Alleged) and Joan Alavedra in relation to the same subject in part anecdotal character. For this reason, the author of the WP article has decided not to use a few anecdotes such as the anecdote about the hiring of the Italian clarinetist Josep Nori Zavalloni from the Catalan-language WP article. Further literature references on the subject of “Orchestra Pau Casals” can be found in the online article by Pepe Reche Antón.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Orquestra Pau Casals. In: Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h Pepe Reche Antón: La Preocupació per les Trompes de l'Orquestra Pau Casals.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Fundació Pau Casals: Biografia de Pau Casals.
  6. ↑ a b c d e f Pablo Casals Scrapbook: The Orchestra Pau Casals.
  7. ^ Elmer Richard Churchill, Linda R. Churchill: 45 Profiles in Modern Music . 1996.
  8. ^ Bernard Taper: Cellist in exile: a portrait of Pablo Casals . 1962.
  9. ↑ Quotation from: Peter Gutmann: Pablo Casals - The Musician and the Man. In: Classical Notes. 2004, accessed on October 15, 2019 .
  10. ↑ a b c d Josep M. Corredor: Conversaciones con Pau Casals: Recuerdo y opiniones de un músico . Buenos Aires 1955.