150 years since birth

"My contribution to peace may be small, but I will have given all I can to achieve an ideal that I hold sacred."

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Pau Casals (El Vendrell, December 29, 1876-San Juan de Puerto Rico, October 22, 1973) is an exceptional opportunity to celebrate one of the most universal figures in Catalan culture and music of the 20th century. Casals profoundly transformed the way music and the role of the artist in society are understood. For Casals, music could not be separated from life. And his life was marked by strong humanistic convictions.

As a performer, Casals revolutionized the technique and expressiveness of the cello and helped to rescue Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suites from oblivion. His activity as a conductor and promoter of musical projects – such as the Pau Casals Orchestra and the Associació Obrera de Concerts, with concerts held at the Palau de la Música Catalana – turned Barcelona into a first-rate musical centre during the first decades of the 20th century. As a composer, works such as El pessebre have been called to form part of the musical memory of Catalan culture.

Beyond his artistic career, Pau Casals also became one of the voices of his time who most firmly defended the values ​​of freedom, democracy and human dignity, and, consequently, contributed to transmitting a firm message in favor of world peace, as he demonstrated in the speech he gave after being honored with the United Nations Peace Medal in 1971, which symbolizes his universal legacy of humanism and hope.

The Palau de la Música Catalana commemorates this anniversary throughout the season with a multitude of concerts that allow us to evoke his unique personality, who understood music as a tool for cultural and moral transformation and who continues to inspire us as an example of artistic excellence, personal integrity and commitment to the universal values ​​of peace, freedom and human dignity.