6 February
13:00–13:30 Shanti Nachtergaele & Edward Klorman: “«As if he were not the same person»: Schenker on Casals as cellist, conductor, and businessman”
In diary entries dating from 1926–29, the Viennese music theorist Heinrich Schenker displays a keen interest in Casals, reflecting on his activities as both a cellist and a conductor. These writings demonstrate a conflicted view of Casals. Schenker’s response to Casals’s performance of Bach’s Third Cello Suite in Vienna on 12 March 1926 was uncharacteristically effusive, commending the cellist’s “incomparable command of the instrument” and “uncommonly strong instinct for synthesis.” That performance not only prompted Schenker to immediately seek out tickets for Casals’s second Vienna concert, but also inspired an extended analytical essay on the Third Suite’s Sarabande. That essay, which focuses on voice leading and musical structure, also includes interpretive suggestions that were in all likelihood inspired by the Casals concert that Schenker so loved.
Yet, despite consistently praising Casals the cello soloist, Schenker took issue with Casals the conductor, responding to one performance with the indictment, “shockingly bad, too fast, uninspired, as if he were not the same person who plays the cello” (30 March 1927). Schenker was also critical of the cellist’s chamber music performances and what he perceived to be a “business sense” in the way Casals presented himself as a musician, including in an interview published in the Neue Freie Presse on 19 August 1826.
Although Schenker is today best known for his writings on music analysis, his diaries and correspondence provide a detailed account of concert life and musical broadcasts in Vienna during the early twentieth century. His reactions to Casals’s performances reveal an unexpectedly ambivalent, nuanced perspective on the Catalan musician in terms of his cello playing, conducting, and self presentation.
Shanti Nachtergaele is an independent scholar based in Montreal. She holds a PhD in musicology from McGill University and wrote her dissertation on the sociomaterial history of the double bass, c.1760–1890. She was the recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and has published in Early Music, Music and the Moving Image, and The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies. Also an active performer on double bass and violone, she performs regularly with period instrument ensembles across Canada.
Edward Klorman is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Musical Analysis and Performance at McGill University in Montréal. His first book, Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works, examines metaphors of “conversation” in this repertoire from analytical, historical, and performance perspectives. His new book on J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. He is also an accomplished modern and baroque violist, specializing in chamber music.