2 mins
From the ARCHIVE
FROM THE STRAD JUNE 1951 VOL. 57 NO.734
Could cellists eventually be supplanted by machines? That’s the fear of writer M.B. Stanfield as the 20th century enters its second half
CELLISTIC CROSSROADS
By M. B. Stanfield
This is the Festival of Britain year and the first of a new half century It stands, therefore, as a kind of crossroads. If we are wise, as we reach it, we will imagine that we come to a “halt” sign, and pause for a survey before proceeding on our way. There are the problems of the main highway to be considered––these represent the general trends and tendencies of our times––and there are those of our own subsidiary road, such as all travellers encounter, when coming from the past and going onwards, towards the future. It is very important that before crossing the highway we should be quite clear in our minds how its traffic will affect that on our own route: to what extent it is advisable to match its pace with ours, when and where it is better to let it pass us and preserve, for ourselves, a more leisurely gait which enables us to see more of the countryside.
Casals summed up the situation when he said in private conversation in 1945: “I am the last of the nineteenth century soloists”. Yet although this is true, it is not the whole truth: he is also the first artist of the twentieth century. Since his debut in 1899 there has been a swing of the pendulum. This has brought far more sweeping changes than any he could have envisaged when, as a young man, he set out to discover the technical means through which the cello could be played as freely and as naturally as the violin. Nevertheless, in obeying his impulse to seek it, he was acting as the unconscious forerunner of the modern world, with its inherent demand that musical execution should appear easy, no matter how difficult, in actuality, it might be.
One of the principal features of this century is the decline of individualism and the growth of mass-production. It is here that we find Casals so definitely linked with the past, where each one of us should make a determined effort to hold on to the lessons that it teaches, recognising that impersonality in music is one of its chief present dangers. Once the precious human factor is lost, interpretation vanishes. This idea, carried to its logical conclusion, leads us to consider in all seriousness a state similar to that described in Huxley’s fantasy, “Brave New World”, in which a fine machine would surely come to take the place of the concert artist.