Pau Casals: Music and commitment in the journalism of the Spanish Civil War CSSR, 7 (2017) 27 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Casals had not performed in the capital of France for ten years. The programme, which featured Bocherini, Schumann and Haydn, was splendid and earned warm applause from the audience, including the eminences in the presidential boxes with the secretaries of foreign affairs Henry Laugier and Rochart. Other audience members were French ministers such as Pierre Cot, Jean Zay and Leo Lagrange, the presidents of the Senate and of the Chamber of Deputies, the Minister of State Violette, ambassadors from a dozen European and American powers like Mexico and the United States, along with a considerable retinue of intellectuals and artists (Cocteau, Tzara, Le Courbousier, Nyzan, Aragon, etc.), lawyers like Henry Torres, etc. From Catalonia, the audience included Antoni M. Sbert as the president of the Catalan Committee for the World Fair and the poet Josep Carner, in his diplomat capacity as the minister councillor. Other Barcelona newspapers also reported on it. G. Sánchez-Boxa in El Día Gráfico38 described Casals’ performance as a “proper statement, calmly launching the Republican cause in bloody Spain to the countries in attendance”. 3. 1938: The defeat of the Ebro River, the eve of the end We know that in January 1938, he was in Prada in the Grand Hotel. He sent a letter to Pena on the 29th in which he mentioned the difficulties he was having purchasing the supplies Pena had requested and then getting them to him. He suggested that Pena get in touch with the offices of the Generalitat in Paris and said that “they will have a direct way to make these shipments”. We should highlight from the letter the comment on the bombardments, although the terrible ones that led to huge numbers of mortalities were yet to come. In this letter on the 29th of January, he wrote an extraordinary paragraph, as honest as a private letter can be, where he expressed his personal suffering and sense of political responsibility for the attacks since Hilari Raguer exhumed a telegram from Mussolini. He also stated that the acts were meant to terrorise the people.
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SÁNCHEZ- BOXA: “Pablo Casals”, El Día Gráfico, (24-XII-1937).