When Casals Found the Bach Suites
Six six-line stanzas for the six six-movement suites
By Deborah Bachels Schmidt, El Sobrante, CA
One of three Grand Prize Winners in the
31st Dancing Poetry Festival, 2024
For nearly two centuries
this music lay silent.
how can that be? What does it mean
for such a work of art
to go dormant,
to sleep on the page,
waiting for the kiss of the bow on the strings?
There must have been a great stillness
of certain celestial cords reserved for just this.
Maybe keeping forgotten music alive
is one of the things angels do.
And what were
the thousand small happenstances—
A trunk in the attic,
A misplaced hat, a missed train—
That led the thirteen-year-old Casals
To that second-hand bookshop in Barcelona?
The suites must have begun to sing to him
even as he opened the fragile copy.
And then what a time of discovery,
of recognition so profound
that it brought tears to his eyes,
kept him awake at night—
he practiced them every day,
every day for ten years
before he felt ready to perform them.
By then he had made them so fully his own
that he, his cello, and the Bach
were one,
a unity of spirit in motion,
a dance between discipline and expression
so complete, so freshly realized
in each moment
that the promise of the long silence
was at last fulfilled.
