Breathing life back into Pablo Casals' 280-year-old cello

Pablo Casals made musical history with his cello, playing for kings, queens and presidents around the world. But following his death in 1973, the instrument was left unused for decades—until a young Israeli musician brought it back to life.

Pablo Casals bought the 1733 Gofriller in 1913, when it was already 180 years old.  

Casals was an international star when he bought the cello. He could have had a Stradivarius.

Instead he chose an instrument made by Mateo Gofriller, who was then unknown; his name wasn't even on the label.

For the next 60 years, the Gofriller's voice was Casals' voice. He played it on recordings that changed musical history. He played it in exile, for kings and queens, and as an older man, he played it at the White House for President John F. Kennedy.

'It's human, speaking. You hear a story when he plays,' says cellist Amit Peled, a longtime admirer of Casals' work.

'This cello is like a human being, and not a young one—one with life experience. When you draw the bow, it really goes into your guts. It's painful.

'I think Casals liked his cello because he always looked for how to make a musical phrase sound like poetry.

Casals himself said that all his life he used his cello to speak for 'the soul of his country'.

Casals' life as a musician

In April 1937 the Spanish Civil War was raging, and General Franco had Hitler's support. Casals' home city of Barcelona was about to erupt.

Somehow, Casals got out on a prop plane to Prague.

There, he performed Dvorak's Cello Concerto, two days after bombing raids killed more than 2,000 people in Guernica.

Today the piece is the most famous concerto for cello.

By 1939, the Fascists had won and Franco became Spain's dictator. Casals went into exile, never to return.

For decades after, he made a ritual of closing his concerts with a Catalan folk melody that became his musical plea for peace, 'Song of the birds'.

Casals did not live to see the end of Franco's regime. He died in 1973, two years before Franco's downfall, and his cello—his 'oldest and dearest friend'—was left in the care of his widow, Marta Casals Istomin.

A fine cellist herself, at 18 Marta won a scholarship to travel from her home in Puerto Rico to study in France with the man she still calls maestro.

Marta and Casals had what the papers called a 'May-December romance'. She was 20 years old on their wedding day; Casals was 80.

'Once people see us,' she told a reporter in 1962, 'they understand. I wish many others were as happy as we are.'

Marta Casals Istomin remembers his morning routine as one that would tire a musician half his age.

'He went out and had a wonderful walk and had his benediction from nature. Then he would come back and play two preludes and fugues of Bach on the piano. Then he would have breakfast,' she says.

By this time it was 9am. Then he would take the cello and play for three hours straight.

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'Scales, arpeggios, difficult passages. The morning session would always end with one of the suites of Bach, every day. But on Sundays he would play prelude six because it was the most difficult.'

Bach was the key to Casals' daily routine.

'You know he discovered Bach for us cellists,' Amit Peled says.

The Bach suites today are at the heart of what it means to play cello—every serious cellist studies them, but before Casals they were virtually unknown.

Casals was a teenager when he found a copy of the Bach cello suites in a second-hand shop in Barcelona. He studied them for 12 years before he played one in concert, and was past 60 when he recorded the full set.

'There was nothing for him to build on as tradition, of how to play Bach. He was the pioneer that started it,' Peled says.

'What I love about his Bach is its sincerity and how honest it is.'

Amit Peled teaches at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where the halls may be a bit worn, but ring with sounds of some of the most gifted young classical players in the US.

Peled was born in Israel in 1973, the year that Casals died.

'I started playing the cello when I was 10 years old, which is quite late,' he says.

'I grew up in a kibbutz. My parents bought me a tape as a present. I put it in the boom box and that cassette was Casals. I started listening to it, every night I would fall asleep with it.'

Amit Peled also plays Bach every day. 

'It's so hard, not because of the notes, not because of the technique, but because of how pure and open it is,' he says.

'It's a meditative state that you want to start the day with, to be holy. I'm not religious in any way but if I were, it would be the Bach religion.'

A mutual love of Bach

Maybe that love of Bach is what caught the ear of Marta Casals Istomin. After they met through a mutual friend, Peled was invited to visit her in Washington.

'I was very nervous. I started with the Bach suites and I played the whole prelude,' Peled says.

'Then she stopped me and said: "Usually when I hear young artists I shut my ears off right away."'

Marta Casals Istomin recalls the meeting.

'I could see that he had it. He had a way of playing that is very expressive, and also he's a very warm human being,' she says.

'I decided, OK, you always take a chance, but what a chance—it's like a last chance in life.'

She asked Peled if he'd like to visit the cello in New York. He didn't hesitate.

Repairing the Gofriller

'The feeling was that it's asleep, it's full of dust. It smelled like his pipe!' Peled recalls.

'It was very hard to find a way to make it blossom and ring. This cello is known in history to be one that is not so easy to open up, but once you know how to do that, it's the best!'

The cello needed significant work. Its neck had sunk over the years, diminishing its natural carrying power.

The repairs required opening up the instrument—removing the top—a nerve-wracking prospect when dealing with wood that's almost 300 years old.

'Now it's in great shape,' Peled says.

'Having it a few months now, it suggests new ways of playing and new colours that you didn't know existed. Now I feel that my voice can be heard through it, fully.'

Amit Peled has been giving an unusual series of concerts. Each replicates a program that Casals himself played exactly 100 years earlier.

When that's done, Marta Casals Istomin says she plans to let the instrument rest a while.

And maybe one day, in the spirit of Casals' lifelong enthusiasm for young musicians, the 1733 Gofriller may find its way into the hands of another younger cellist.