Robert Casadesus: Les partitions oubliées, Piano Music II

Description

Robert Casadesus was, and still is, the best-known representative of a family of professional musicians, among whom there are several notable figures who achieved international and lasting fame. His ancestry came from Catalunya, and his grandfather, Luis, had a talent for music, though life circumstances prevented him from developing this gift into a profession. This missed opportunity, however, led Luis to wish for his children a future as musicians. His family was numerous: thirteen children, nine of whom lived up to adulthood; of these, all but one were musicians. One of them was Robert senior, father of the protagonist of this Da Vinci Classics album; he had a successful career in the performing arts, and became the director of the French Theatre in New York City.
His son Robert showed musical gifts at an early age, and his grandfather Luis would have wished him to become a violinist; however, the child was inclined to the piano, and he received his first piano lessons from his aunts. Soon, however, he needed a more qualified teaching, and was welcomed in the class of Isidore Philipp, the most famous and celebrated piano teacher of the time. Young Robert caught the attention of such a great composer as Gabriel Fauré, who congratulated him warmly; and of Lucien Capet, the founder of the eponymous quartet, in which two of Robert’s uncles also played. Still another uncle, Marius, who was close in age to his nephew Robert, enjoyed playing duos for violin and piano with him, and they toured together extensively also in the following years.
At the Conservatory of Paris, where Casadesus was studying under Louis Diémer, he met another young musician, pianist Gabrielle (Gaby) L’Hôte, who was to become his fiancée, his wife, and a lifelong partner in piano duos. Their mutual love and artistic understanding were remarkable; they made a very happy couple and family, which was pervaded by music. Both did maintain their activity as soloists, in varying degrees, but they also loved playing together; later, their duo would become a trio, when their son Jean joined them occasionally. They played existing works for piano trio (such as Mozart’s Triple Concerto), but also works written expressly by Robert, who had developed noteworthy skills as a composer, as this recording amply demonstrates. As we will shortly see, however, the love for music and for each other which inspired the members of this family was to be profoundly tried by unexpected circumstances.
The ”First Family of the Piano”, as they were introduced in a documentary of 1967, was in fact to be destroyed by Jean’s death just five years later (1972); Robert and Gaby’s son died in a car accident ensuing, by utter unluck, from his taking a car after having missed a plane. This loss was fatal to Robert, who died not even nine months later. Gaby, who survived them by many years, consecrated the remainder of her long life to the preservation of their memory, organizing concerts, recordings, competitions, and overseeing the publication of her husband’s works. She would die once her mission had been accomplished, i.e. shortly after the centenary of her husband’s birth.
Before this tragical epilogue, however, the Casadesus lived a happy and fruitful life. The beginnings of Robert’s piano career took place under the aegis of none other than Maurice Ravel, who was deeply impressed upon hearing him play, and who rightly guessed that Robert’s musical intelligence was a composer’s. The friendship between Robert and Ravel was a deep and lasting one, and, obviously, involved their artistry. Casadesus recorded Ravel’s complete piano works; at first he recorded some of them on piano rolls, in London, and, later, on disks. The two musicians also played together in public, performing four-hand piano pieces and alternating at the piano chair for solo pieces.
In 1934, Ravel was appointed General Director of the American Conservatoire of Fontainebleau, where Robert’s former teacher, Isidore Philipp, had taught for years. The Conservatoire had been founded by another of Robert’s many uncles, Francis, together with Walter Damrosch. It had been the result of an experiment which had happened during World War I; in 1917, Francis Casadesus had given lessons to the musicians of the American Army, and Damrosch, impressed by the quality of his teaching, had wished for it to remain available to Americans when peace, thankfully, returned. This reality provided France in general, but specifically the Casadesus tribe, with a powerful foothold in America, where Robert was to perform regularly in the most important theatres and halls and under the baton of conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Sergey Koussevitzky or Bruno Walter.
Beyond Robert’s career, America was to become crucial for the family as a haven in the turmoil of the war years. In 1940, Robert’s entire family (which by then included his wife Gaby and his sons Jean and Guy) was in the US for one of their yearly concert tours; as Europe was becoming increasingly unsafe due to World War II, they decided to remain in the States, where Robert recreated the Fontainebleau Conservatory on American soil. They would remain in the USA for six years, moving around the country as work opportunities presented themselves; the family’s size was also to increase during those years, with the birth of a daughter, Thérèse. In America, they became acquainted with, and befriended, some famous European exiles, including, for instance, physicist Albert Einstein, who loved to play chamber music and frequently performed as a violinist with Gaby. Robert, instead, would form a stable duo with Zino Francescatti, one of the greatest violinists of the era, with whom he felt a deep musical syntony. They played extensively together, both in America and later in Europe, and they produced recordings which made history.
The Casadesus family also befriended Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, as well as Leonard Bernstein and Vladimir Horowitz during their stay in the States.
Once the war was over, they returned to their homeland; here, they had to face one further, serious problem, i.e. the illness of their daughter who caught poliomyelitis. The family bravely helped her, showing that unity which always marked their life together. In the post-war years, Robert would continue his activity as a solo and chamber music performer, as an acclaimed and sought-for teacher, and as a composer.
This aspect of his musicianship is much less known than it deserves, and for this reason an endeavour such as the current one is a welcome initiative for preserving the memory of, and disseminate knowledge about, the creative output of one of the great musicians of the twentieth century. Casadesus left an impressive portfolio of 69 opus numbers, comprising large-scale works such as symphonies (seven!), concertos for one, two, or three pianos, but also for solo violin, cello, and lute, and numerous chamber music works, along with a substantial portion of works for piano alone. Among these, we may cite the Etudes, Sonatas, and the Cadenzas written for Piano Concertos by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Robert Casadesus joined a series of musicians (including some of the greatest of all times, such as Chopin and Debussy) who completed one or more series of twenty-four Preludes, openly referencing the two volumes of twenty-four Preludes and Fugues each composed by Bach in the eighteenth century and famously named Well-Tempered Clavier. Casadesus’ set was completed in 1924, and it attracted the attention of both pianists and critics. Half a century later, in 1976, critic Henk van Overeem would express his opinion about them with the following words: “The compositions that Casadesus entrusted to the paper bear witness to a musician’s spirit and French finesse and are, on the whole, perfectly suited to his ‘own’ instrument, the piano. This was clearly demonstrated by the. […] Dedicated to Maurice Ravel, these pieces combine the playfulness of Poulenc with the harmonic inventiveness of Milhaud or Honegger”.
In fact, Casadesus poured into this collection his own expertise as a concert pianist, his inventiveness as a composer, and his knowledge of the repertoire and style of other composers, both contemporaries of him and of the past. The listener will find here a plethora of suggestive stimuli, which reveal both the musicality of Casadesus’ muse, with their gently floating lines, and his brilliant virtuosity. The various indications and titles reveal the variety and diversity of the composer’s sources of inspiration; they include, for instance, pieces labelled as “folk lullaby”, “waltz”, “in the Spanish gusto”, “in the old style”, “bourrée”, etc., along with other fascinating tempo and expression indications which are frequently reminiscent of the French Impressionism.
His Toccata op. 40 is from a decidedly later time; it was written in 1946 for Jean, and would be premiered four years later by his wife Gaby. This piece has enjoyed great popularity, also because it was a required work at the Casadesus International Piano Competition. If the Préludes echoed most notably those by Chopin and Debussy, this Toccata openly references other eponymous works such as Schumann’s, Prokofev’s, and Ravel’s. The “toccata” style in fact is represented by the rapid succession of a perpetuum mobile made of strings of semiquavers, but is far more than a mere technical exercise: its fame is well-deserved as it is a masterful piece which attracts and conquers players and listeners alike.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2023