Dissolving Music In Mind Chapter 3

In Bach's works, I see the presence of God.

At the age of eleven, I heard a cello for the first time, and my long and precious companionship with the cello began! A trio came to Vendrell to play at a concert: a pianist, a violinist and a cellist. My father took me to the concert, which was held in the small hall of the Catholic Center, and the audience was the townspeople, fishermen and farmers, who were dressed in Sunday clothes - as they always did on such occasions. The cellist was Josep García, who taught at the Barcelona Municipal Conservatory of Music. 

He was handsome, with a high forehead and a long mustache; his body seemed to be in harmony with the instrument he played. When I saw his cello, I was fascinated by it, I had never seen a cello before. As soon as I heard the first few notes, I was overwhelmed by a surge of emotions, as if I couldn't breathe. The sound was very gentle, very beautiful, very human, yes, very human. I had never heard such a beautiful sound, and a light and warmth filled my heart. At the end of the first piece, I said to my father, "Dad, this is the most beautiful instrument I have ever heard. This is the instrument I want to play."

After that concert, I repeatedly asked my father for the cello and begged him to give me one. That was more than 80 years ago, and since then, I have had an indissoluble bond with this instrument, which will become my companion and friend in the future of my life. Of course, the violin, piano and other instruments have also brought me joy, but for me, the cello is something special and unique. I began to play the violin the same way I played the cello.

My mother understood what was going on. She told my father: "Xavier showed such a passion for the cello that he must be given the opportunity to learn it properly. Vendrell doesn't have a qualified teacher who can teach him properly, so we have to arrange for him to go to the music school in Barcelona."

My father was shocked. "What are you talking about?" he asked. "How can Xavier go to Barcelona? We don't have the money."

"We will find a way," said his mother. "I will take him. Xavier is a musician. It is in his nature. He was born to be a musician. Let him go wherever he wants to go. There is no other choice."

My father was not convinced. In fact, he was already considering having me learn carpentry so I could make a living. "You're daydreaming," he told my mother.

Their discussions about this became more frequent and heated, and I was very distressed. I felt that I was to blame for their disagreement, and I was wondering how to put an end to it, but I didn't know how. Finally, my father reluctantly gave in. He wrote a letter to the Barcelona Municipal Conservatory of Music, asking if they would accept me as a student. He also said that I needed a smaller cello, a three-quarter size, and asked if they knew an instrument maker who could make one for me.

Despite this, when the school gave a positive response and the day for me to go to Barcelona drew closer, my father continued to express his doubts.

"Carlos, dear," his mother would tell him, "you can be sure that this is the right thing to do. It has to be this way. This is the only thing Xavier wanted to do."

My father would shake his head and say, "I don't understand, I don't understand."

And the mother would say: "I know, but you have to have faith. You have to believe it, you have to."

This is something really extraordinary. My mother had some musical training, she was not a musician, unlike my father. Despite this, she knew what my future would be like. I believe she knew it from the beginning, as if she had some special sensitivity, a strange premonition. She just knew. And she always acted on this premonition with a firmness, certainty and calmness that always amazed me. 

This was true not only when I went to Barcelona to study, but also in the years that followed, when I faced choices. The same was true for my two younger brothers, Caleb and Felix. When they were still young, she knew what path they would take in the future. Later, when I gave concerts all over the world and had some success, she was happy for me, but I would not say that she was deeply moved. She had already determined that this would be the case.

Later in my life, I came to understand what she believed. I came to feel that whatever happens is inevitable. I certainly don't mean that we don't have to do anything to become who we want to be. We are changing all the time, and that's the way nature works because we are part of nature. We have a responsibility to keep working on ourselves to better ourselves, but I do believe that we each have our own destiny.

I left Vendrell with mixed feelings. It was my hometown, the place where I spent my childhood. The winding streets I rode my bicycle through, the small house we lived in, the living room where my father practiced piano and gave lessons, the church where I spent many happy hours, the people I wrestled with and played games with at school, all these close and familiar things, I didn't want to leave them. After all, I was only eleven and a half years old, which is not old even for a musician. 

Barcelona is only about eighty kilometers away from Vendrell, but for me, it was like going to another country. What would it be like there? Where would I live? Who would be my friends and teachers? Of course, I was also excited... My mother took the train with me, and my father hugged me tenderly at the train station and said goodbye to me, and at that time I tried to remember that when I was bitten by a dog and taken to the hospital, he said to me: "You have to tell yourself that men don't cry."
 
So I went to Barcelona eighty years ago. Barcelona then, as it is now, was a big, chaotic city, with busy streets, busy cafes and museums, crowded shops, and busy docks where ships from all over the world were anchored. For me, it was the gateway to the world in more than one sense: I was destined to spend most of my life in this city, to spend many happy and creative hours with its outstanding citizens, to establish precious friendships with its artists and workers, and to deeply understand the nobility of human beings and, alas, also the suffering of human beings! Half a century later, I would see this beloved city surrounded by fascists, with bombing planes overhead and militias and sandbags in the streets. What child could have imagined that this would happen?

My mother enrolled me in the Barcelona Municipal Conservatory of Music, and then she returned to Vendrell. About a month later, she returned to Barcelona and stayed with me. She arranged for me to live with some of her distant relatives, a carpenter and his wife. They lived in an older part of the city, and most of the neighbors were working class. 

They were kind and gentle, and treated me like their own child. The carpenter's name was Benny, and he was a strange man. He was not tall, but he was fearless and hated evil. He fought crime alone. I discovered this one day when he opened a drawer and found it full of knives and pistols. I was surprised and asked him what these weapons were used for. Then he told me about his unique hobby. 

Almost every night, after finishing work and eating dinner, Benny would leave the house and brave the most chaotic places in the city. There were many crimes in Barcelona at that time. He only had a student's stick on him, but in his hands, it was a powerful weapon. With that stick, unobtrusive but visible, he stood up to notorious gangsters: robbers, thieves, and other desperate people. He would walk up to a gangster, point out what a bad guy he was, what bad things he had done, and then say, "You have to change your way of life. Now give me your pistol." Depending on the situation, he might also demand the knife. 

The gangsters knew his reputation and respected him, and usually obeyed. Of course, when some gangsters didn't want to obey, he would use his stick. One night, he came home with a knife wound. He shrugged his shoulders and said to his wife and me, "Don't worry, it's nothing. I'll make it right tomorrow." The next night he walked into the house with a happy smile and said, "I'm even with that guy." I guess you could say he was like an apostle. I was very impressed with him.

Soon after arriving in Barcelona, I went to pick up the smaller cello that my father had made for me. The maker of the instrument was a friendly man in his early thirties named Maire. When he handed me the cello, he also gave me a bow. I had never held a cello in my hands before, but I immediately played a short piece of music with it, and Maire was very surprised...

At the conservatory I studied very hard, learning harmony, counterpoint and composition, as well as cello and piano. My cello teacher was Josep García, who had played at the Vendrell, and whose playing had a profound influence on me. He was a member of the famous García family, related to the famous singer, composer, actor and teacher Manuel García, who had established perhaps the most outstanding vocal family in history: his daughter was the great soprano Maria, and his son Manuel was a teacher himself, who invented the laryngoscope. Jose García was a fine, well-trained cellist, with beautiful hands on the strings, I have never seen more beautiful hands, and he was a good teacher. 

He was very demanding in his training, and despite his gentle personality, he could sometimes scare his students. During our lessons, he rarely expressed approval. But occasionally, when I was playing, he would turn his back on me and stand there for a long time, and when he turned back to face me again, he would have a very strange expression on his face. I didn't understand it at the time, but later I realized that he was touched. Many years later, after my career had begun, I met him in Buenos Aires, where he had moved. It was such a joyful reunion! He was so proud to have been my teacher, and I was so grateful for everything he had taught me and for his kindness to me. We hugged and cried.

While studying in Barcelona, I began to make some changes to the cello technique that was then customary. Granted, I was only about twelve years old, but something seemed wrong even to a child. Cello players were taught to play with a stiff arm, with the elbow as close to the side as possible. 

In fact, we had to hold a book under the armpit of the bow arm when we were learning! To me, that seemed clumsy and unnatural, and really stupid. So, while practicing at home, I figured out a way to free up the arm and get rid of the restricted and unnatural position. I also felt that the fingering technique and the movement of the left hand could be improved. At that time, cello players had a restricted left hand, which had to move up and down constantly when moving the fingers. 

I tried to open my hand, expand and extend the reach of my left hand, and found that I could play four notes without moving my left hand, while the old method could only play three notes. I began to use the technique I invented in school, and my classmates were amazed. My teacher was also surprised at first, but as I said, he was understanding, and he gradually saw that there was method behind my crazy surface. Anyway, no one practices the cello with a book under their arm these days!

After six months at school, I had improved enough to get a job playing in a café on the outskirts of town. The café was called Tost, after the owner, Mr. Tost, and it was a cozy, family-style place. I played there every day. The salary was four pesetas a day.[1] We were a trio, a violin, a piano, and a cello, and our repertoire was mainly light music: popular tunes of the day, familiar opera selections, and waltzes. 

However, in my young head, the music of the masters was already singing: Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Beethoven. It wasn't long before I began to introduce better music into the program, and I probably used a little cleverness, taking advantage of my young age. The customers liked it very much, so I thought the time had come, and proposed to the café manager and the other members of the trio that we set aside one evening a week for classical music. 

That evening was a great success. Before long, I began to play solo. Word spread about the music in Tost's Café and about the "little fellow" (as I was later called) who played, and customers began to come from far and wide to spend an evening in the café. Mr. Tost was very pleased to see this and was very proud of me. Sometimes he would take me to concerts, and once we went to see Strauss[2] conducting some of his own works at the opera. Strauss was still young at the time and was at the beginning of his career. That experience had a great impact on me.
 
One thing that annoyed Mr. Tost was that I sometimes failed to arrive at his café on time. I was supposed to be there at nine o'clock sharp, but there was so much to see in the city and so many new ideas for a young boy to think about. I might stroll along Las Ramblas, with its charming bird markets and flower shops, explore some neighborhood I had never been to, read a new book, or just daydream in the opera house gardens, so sometimes I was late for work. Once, Mr. Tost was standing in the doorway with a grouchy look on his face when I arrived. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a watch for me. 

"Well," he said, "this may teach you the meaning of time." It was my first watch. I guess I can say that as the years went by, I learned more about time and began to organize and use it carefully, although sometimes Matilda needed to remind me when an appointment was due, especially when I was practicing or studying music. I think that good time management is extremely important for creative work, and I often repeat this phrase to my students: "Freedom - and order!"

In the summer, during the months when school was out, I joined a traveling band. We traveled through the Catalan countryside on horse-drawn buses, along hot, dusty roads, from village to village, performing at fairs, dances, and festivals. We played folk music and dances: waltzes, machokas, sardanas, some songs from America, everything. We would start playing in the evening and continue until the morning. 

The farmers and fishermen were strong enough to dance all night, and for that matter, all day the next day! Those summer tours were very hard, with little time to rest, but I enjoyed them so much! I found a special joy in the wonderful friendship I had with the villagers, playing for them, dancing in the exchanges between them and me, and in the expressions on their faces when they shouted and cheered after the performance. We talked through the language of music. In my performances since then, whether in small recitals or in front of large audiences in large concert halls, I have never lost that feeling - the intimate connection between me and my audience.

After playing at Café Toste for a few years, I got a better job at Café Pajarera. Pajarera means "bird cage" in Spanish, and it was a big round building with glass walls, which was very impressive. I was getting paid better there, and instead of playing in a three-piece band, I was playing in a seven-piece band.

When I was fourteen, I gave my first real concert in Barcelona. It was a charity performance at the Teatro Nova for a well-known old actress, her name was Parra. My father came to Barcelona for the occasion and took me there by tram. I was terribly nervous. When we arrived at the concert hall, I said, "Father, I have forgotten the beginning of the piece! I can't remember a single note! What shall I do?" He calmed me down. That was eighty years ago, but I have never been able to get over the terrible nervousness before a performance, it is still a severe ordeal. Before I go on stage, I suffer from chest pains that torture me. The thought of performing in public is still a nightmare to me.

My father used to come visit me from Bendler once a week. We would take walks together, occasionally visiting the music bookstore to look for sheet music, and a few hours later he would be on his way home. The repertoire at the Café Pahalila was much larger than at the Café Tost, and as I continued to play solo, I needed more music. One day I told my father that I needed to find some new solo music to play at the Café Pahalila, and we set out together to look for it. I will never forget that afternoon for two reasons. 

First, my father bought me my first full-size cello, and I was so proud to own this wonderful instrument! Then we stopped at an old music bookstore near the harbor, and I began to browse through a sheaf of sheet music. Suddenly I came across a tattered stack of papers, faded with age. They were the unaccompanied suites of Bach, written specifically for the cello! I looked at them in amazement: "Suites for unaccompanied cello", and wondered what kind of magic and mystery lay behind these few words? I had never heard of the existence of this suite, and no one, not even my teacher, had ever told me about it. 

I forgot why I had come to the shop, I just stared at the papers, touched them. The scene has never faded. Even today, when I look at the covers of the pieces, I am back in that old shop with its musty, sea-scented smell. I hurried home, clutching the suite as if it were the jewels in the crown, and once I was in the room, I read it over and over again. I was thirteen years old, and over the next eighty years, the discovery of that set of scores has become more and more amazing to me. 

The suite opened up a whole new world. I began to play it, with an indescribable excitement. These pieces became my most cherished music, and I studied and practiced them every day for the next twelve years. Yes, twelve years later, when I was twenty-five, I had the courage to play one of them publicly in a concert. Before that, no violinist or cellist had ever played one of Bach's suites in its entirety. They would only play a section: a sarabon, a gavotte, or a minuet. I played the whole suite: from the prelude to the five dance movements, with all the repetitions that give each movement a beautiful unity, a rhythm and a structure, a complete construction and artistry. 

These pieces were once seen as mechanical and emotionless, academic pieces. Can you imagine? When they are shining with space and poetry, some people think that these pieces are emotionless! They are the essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music.

Shortly before I discovered the Bach suites, there was another incident that had a profound impact on my artistic career. I was still playing at the Café de Toste, and one evening an important visitor came to the café: Leo, the famous Catalan composer and pianist. He was with two friends, the violinist Felix Avos and the cellist Agustín Rubio. Leo had heard about the "little fellow," the boy who was said to play the cello so well, and he wanted to come and see it for himself. 

He sat there, listening intently. He was a short, stout man, about thirty, with a moustache and a mustache, and he smoked a long cigar. At the end of the program, he came over to hug me and said I had a rare talent. "You must come to London with me!" he said. His manner was lively and infectious. "You must come to London to work with me." Of course, I was flattered to hear such an offer from a famous musician. 

But when he repeated the offer to my mother, her reaction was quite different. She said she was grateful for his offer, but she was completely against my going. "My child is still young," she told Leo. "He is too young to go to London and start traveling. He must stay in Barcelona and finish his studies. There will be time for other things in the future."
 
Leo could see that my mother was determined. He said, "Well, your son has such great talent that I feel I must do everything in my power to help him. Let me give you a letter of introduction to Count Oliver, who lives in Madrid, is a very good man, a patron of the arts, a great musician, a great scholar, and a personal advisor to Queen Christina. He has a lot of influence and will be helpful to Xavier' career. When you are ready, take this letter to him." My mother agreed, and Leo left the letter with her.

It was three years before my mother used the letter. She kept it, waiting for the right moment; when she did use it, it would be a very important milestone in my musical career. And that moment came in a very simple way, as life sometimes does.

Later, Leo became my dear friend. He was not only a great artist and an excellent pianist, but also a very unusual person.

He was a child prodigy who made his piano debut at the age of four at the Teatro Romía in Barcelona. At the age of seven he wrote a march that was widely accepted by military bands. As a teenager he had all sorts of wild adventures. He ran away at the age of thirteen and wandered around Europe playing piano and having wild orgies. Then he got on a ship - I think he was a stowaway - and went to America, where he had adventures with Indians and other such things. 

He told such amazing stories! He returned to Spain as a young man and eventually settled in London. He had an extraordinary musical talent and never practiced, not even before concerts; his hands were small, but surprisingly strong and pliable. The music he composed was greatly influenced by his native Catalonia, with its beautiful landscapes and folk melodies, as well as Arabic melodies derived from some of the melodies. He used to say, "I am a Moor." He had a rare sense of humor and was a real bohemian. I heard that he sold his famous dance for only fifteen pesetas, which was the price of a ticket to a bullfight he wanted to see.

The way in which Count Oliver first met Leo is typical of the artist's life. The Count was traveling by train - I think he was going to Switzerland - and he heard a strange noise under his seat. He bent down and saw a boy hiding under it. The boy was Leo, who was hiding there to avoid paying the fare. The Count said, "Excuse me, who are you?" Leo, who was about thirteen at the time, replied, "I am a great artist." That's how they met.

Throughout my adult life, I have believed that humans have the capacity for near-perfection. Humans are truly amazing, capable of such wonderful things, both for themselves and for the world around them! What an accomplishment it was for nature to create humans! However, if humans have an unlimited capacity for good, they also have an unlimited capacity for evil. Both possibilities exist in each of us. I recognized early on that I had the potential for great evil...the worst crimes...just as I had the potential for great good. My mother always said, "There is good and evil in everyone, and you have to make a choice, and that choice determines good and evil. You have to listen to the good in your heart."

During my teenage years, I had my first major crisis, and I can't say exactly why. I was finishing my education, but I hadn't decided on my future. I was troubled by my parents' disagreement about my career. They still couldn't agree, my father thought I was too reckless to want to dedicate myself to music, and my mother was adamant that I should do it. It was painful to think that I was the cause of this conflict. I just wanted it to end. At the same time, I was full of new ideas, concepts, and thoughts, and I was constantly exploring, searching, and examining the world around me. I expanded my horizons greatly, reading everything I could get my hands on, and thinking more about the meaning of life.

Before that, I had discovered so much beauty, but now I saw so much ugliness! How much evil! How much suffering and human toil! I asked myself: Was humanity created to live in such filth and degradation? I saw the suffering around me, the poverty, the misery, the inhumanity of human beings to each other. I saw people living in hunger, with almost nothing to feed their children. I saw beggars in the streets, and I saw the age-old inequality between the rich and the poor. 

I saw with my own eyes the oppression that ordinary people suffered in their lives, the harsh laws and the repressive measures. Injustice and violence disgusted me, and an officer and his sword made me shudder. I thought about this situation day and night. I walked the streets of Barcelona, feeling sad and full of worries. I was in a dark pit, out of tune with the world. I did not want the day to dawn, and at night I sought escape in sleep. I did not understand why there was such evil in the world, why people killed each other, and I did not understand the meaning of life under such circumstances, or the meaning of my own life. Selfishness was rampant, and I asked myself, where can I find compassion?

I could no longer lose myself in music. I didn't think music or any form of art could provide the answer, and I never had. Music had to serve a purpose, had to be part of something bigger than music, part of humanity; and that was the heart of my argument with music today - the lack of humanity in it. The musician is human, and his attitude toward life is more important than his music, and the two cannot be separated.

I was in so much pain that I felt the only way to end my suffering was to end my life. I began to be obsessed with thoughts of suicide. I did not tell my mother that I was thinking of suicide, because I did not want her to worry about it. But she could see the pain in my heart by looking at me. She could always see my heart. "What's the matter?" she would say to me, "Dear Xavier, what is troubling you so much?" I would say, "Nothing, dear mother." She would remain silent and not ask any more questions, but I could see the worry and pain in her eyes.
 
Something in me was fighting the suicide idea, some inner will to live, perhaps what the philosopher Bergson[3] called the "vital impulse." A war was going on inside me. I began to look for other ways to get out, some respite, and thought that perhaps I could find solace in religion. I talked to my mother about religion. She was not formally religious, and she never went to mass. Although I never heard her oppose other people's religions or beliefs, she did not usually talk about religion. She respected other people's religious beliefs. She did not try to influence me in this matter. 

She said to me: "Son, this is something you have to find out for yourself. You have everything in your heart, dear Xavier, you have to find it out for yourself." I turned to religious mysticism, desperately trying to find comfort, answers to my questions, peace, and relief from the pain that tormented me. I would often leave the church, walk a few steps, and then hurried back. But it was useless. Since I could not find the answer in the human dream of heaven, I looked for the answer in the worldly dream. 

I read some of Marx and Engels's works, and I had socialist friends among my friends. I thought that I might find the answer in the doctrine of socialism, but this was not the case. I also found in it a dogma that did not satisfy me, a utopian dream that was not real to me, full of fantasies of trying to change humanity and society. How, I asked myself, could I change humanity when it was full of selfishness and cynicism, when aggression was part of its nature?

It is hard to say what brought me out of this abyss. Perhaps it was the inner struggle and the love of life, perhaps it was the hope in my heart that could not be destroyed. Then, at about the same time, my mother decided that it was time for me to leave Barcelona. She gave me all the support she could when I needed it most. Although I did not reveal to her the depth of my despair, she felt it. It was then that she proposed that we go to Madrid. "It is time," she said, "for us to accept Leo's suggestion and go to Count Oliver with his letter of introduction."

My mother and my father had a long and violent argument. My father was full of doubts. It was also a problem for my mother to take my two younger brothers with her. Luís and Felix were both born when we were in Barcelona. Luís was about three years old and Felix was still a baby. But in the end it was decided that my mother, I and my two younger brothers would go together. I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't gone to Madrid.