JOYS AND SORROWS: Reflections by Pablo Casals

by Pablo Casals ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1970

Pablo Casals' first book in his 93 years is that rare prize in the uneven genre of autobiography--it is not an autobiography--not an inventory, date-book or foot-noted testament. The chronology is casual, fluid, expanding and contracting pasts and presents with the simple suspiration of easy conversation. Eminently readable, Joys and Sorrows crisscross Casals' nearly century-old world tenanted by geniuses, heads of state, notables of nearly every art and letter, including Ysaye, Rachmaninoff, Thibaud, Bauer, Cortot, Schoenberg, Saint-Saens. But the humble and human identification presides, finding its touchstone for music and life in ""the language of everybody."" He describes a private animal kingdom in his native Catalonia, a special kinship with his Arabian stallion, German shepherd, a flock of canaries and a perspicacious burro. Casals' world view spans the Spanish Civil War, two World Wars, and a thirty-year-long voluntary exile from bis Franco-ruled homeland. His ideals of peace, freedom and a natural dignity for man find their best known expression in his Nativity oratorio ""El Pessebre,"" but before that there was his organization of the Workingmen's Association, the Barcelona Orchestra, the seventeen years in the French Pyrenees aiding his countrymen in concentration camps. Many portraits emerge from this work--the artist, immensely talented, tireless, legendary--the Catalan, lyrical, proud, fiercely attached to country--the man, energized, natural, compassionate. Reflections, refractions of a mind that does not miss its mark.

Pub Date: April 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION