Beschreibung

Despite his decided vocation for the cello, which he studied and began to play with a singular personality, Pau Casals, like most ambitious creators, wrote at the piano and for the piano, as this was the didactic instrument par excellence, which sums up the complete vision of the creative process. Whether for solo instrument or for piano accompanying other solo instruments, any composer usually worked on the piano. So far it has not been possible to document that Casals had any systematic training on this instrument, although, on the other hand, this was more common at that time than it is today, since, given its timbral and combinatory qualities, it was particularly attractive for experimentation and compositions of different sizes.

The first piano composition written in his lifetime has a known addressee and an obvious purpose: the wife of Guillermo Morphy y Ferriz de Guzmán (Madrid, 1836-1899), known as Count Morphy, a distinguished court figure, historian, pedagogue, composer of operas such as Lizzie and, above all, cultural adviser to Alfonso XII and the Queen Regent María Cristina. Thanks to his farsightedness and sense of patronage, future musicians such as Bretón, Albéniz and Casals himself – precisely on Albéniz’s advice – received decisive support in their careers. Dedicating a work to his benefactor, even if it was as a first product and for an instrument that was not his main instrument, is nothing less than a gesture of cordiality towards his protector.

Most of them are works of a diverse character, close to salon music, which have the appearance of creative entertainments characterised by a basically tonal and transparent language in which the tendency to modulate to neighbouring tonalities abounds, more as a momentary expressive resource than as a structural evolutionary procedure.They are evidence of the lack of systematic work on the instrument and also of the commonplaces of the piano composition of his time. In some of these works the pianistic thread is broken, resulting in the effect of unfinished products; the occasional appearance of chords of difficult or unrealistic fingering leads one to think of intentions closer to probation than to products destined for ordinary interpretative use. But not all these piano works are circumstantial. Alongside those with a salon music character, there are some with an incipient desire for greater commitment, such as, for example, the three ‘Organic Preludes’, articulated together, with a more projective pretension.