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Casals Speech at Suzuki / Yoshio Sato student concert in Japan (1961)

1,626 views · Published 11 December 2014 · 5:58 · Indexed 18 October 2026

Channel: Mark O'Connor · 2014 · Music

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New York Times confirms from Marta Casals Istomin (Pablo Casals' widow) that he never endorsed the Suzuki Method and furthermore, was not even aware of it.


Casals attended the 1961 student demonstration in Japan to see his pupil Yoshio Sata’s Japanese cello students perform Saint-Saens, "The Swan and a Bach "Bourree." His statements reflected other teachers there, not just Suzuki.  Asking to hear the tape finally collected by the New York Times revealed what was suspected all along.  Casals does not mention Suzuki nor his method of violin education in his address.  There is no endorsement of Suzuki's approach to violin pedagogy by Pablo Casals then, nor at any other time.

NYTimes: “Mr. O’Connor dissects this event on his blog with the minute attention to detail that some people use to analyze the Zaprude film of the John F. Kennedy assassination. He charged that an old edition of “Nurtured by Love,” which has a blurb on the cover from a Newsweek article about Mr. Suzuki that mentioned the Casals visit, falsely implied that Casals had endorsed the Suzuki method. He questioned why a photograph of the two men at the event obscured Mr. Suzuki’s face, whether the event even took place and, if it did, why there was no tape of it.”

NYTimes: “Casals was 84 at the time, not 75, as the book said, and the remarks attributed to him were evidently translated from the English that Casals spoke into Japanese, and then back into English for the English translation of the book.”

NYTimes: “Casals’s widow, Marta Casals Istomin, said in a telephone interview that she did not wish to be drawn into a controversy over competing violin methods.”

NYTimes: “But she confirmed that she had attended the Suzuki concert in Tokyo with Casals in 1961. She said that Casals, who had taken a lifelong interest in children and music for children, had been “very moved” by the sight of so many young children playing music, and that he had embraced Mr. Suzuki, but that he had not endorsed the method or given much thought to it.”

NYTimes: ““He was very touched to hear these children,” Ms. Casals Istomin said in an interview, adding that Casals had wept, as he often did at concerts. “At that moment, he didn’t think of it as a method. He thought of it as an idea of bringing young people together with music, not whether it was a good method or a bad method.””

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Pablo Casals visit in 1961 to Japan and chronicled by Shinichi Suzuki was principally to see one of his former cello students and his group of young Japanese cello students play a demonstration. The speech Casals gave at the conclusion of the event would have largely been about his former pupil and his cello students. Since Casals does not mention Suzuki's name in the speech, nor at any other time for the remainder of his life did he mention the name Suzuki or the Suzuki Method, the only logical explanation is that it was more about the cello students than Suzuki's violin students. Casals is the iconic cello player after all. He comments a lot on the music itself - mostly Bach. But never on how it was played by the students. Just the fact that it was being taught in Japan and there were many children involved learning classical music 15 years after WWII. 

Since he did not mention "Suzuki" for the entire speech, it easily could have been about the cello students who weren't taking the Suzuki Method or Talent Education approach at all.

Excerpted from Suzuki's own "Nurtured by Love" autobiography:

"Following this part of the concert, 15 young cello students taught by Yoshio Sato, a pupil of Casals, played Saint-Saens, "The Swan and a Bach "Bourree."

It seems to say that the cellos students were last on the program... but whatever the order, his speech followed the final aspects of the program. So invariably he would have been mostly referring to how well his own pupil taught Japanese children how to play Bach on cello. If you will, the Casals "method."

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