Extract from
Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle, http://tiny.cc/9eznzz ) (Translation by the author)
"We discover a world of feelings and ideas created with the simplest of materials."
Laurence Lesser, cello player on the Bach suites for cello
In a music store in Barcelona, 13-year-old Pablo Casals happened to come across a folder of music that he had never heard of and that no one in his network of musicians knew about. He skimmed through the cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach, which must have fallen into oblivion. For the next ten years, he was to play them daily and try to fathom their virtuosity, before performing one of the suites in public for the first time as a professional musician. Casals worked on the suites for a further 35 years before finally recording them in the studio at the age of 60 and immortalizing them as classics of music history.
Before Casals made the suites known to the general public, the Bach pieces, whose origins lie in motifs from old European dances, were regarded by a small circle of cellists more as technical etudes to achieve virtuoso maturity. But with Casal's passion and epic dimension, they stired up the ambition of many cellists and conquered the concert halls from then on. Mario Brunello played the suites at sunrise on the crater rim of Mount Fuji as part of an Arion-Edo Foundation festival in 2007 and was quoted as saying, "Bach's music comes closest to the absolute and to perfection." (Brunello 2007)
With his life's work, the reinterpretation of the Bach suites, Casals has demonstrated a professional ability that will become increasingly important in the next society and that can be described as "lightness" by the writer Italo Calvino and his "Harvard Lectures for the Next Millennium".
"My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” Italo Calvino, 1991
For Calvino, it is about creating an "atmosphere of floating abstraction" (ibid., p. 30) and leaving the heaviness behind in the next age. He uses the figure of Medusa as a symbol of heaviness, who can only be defeated by Perseus (who is equipped with winged sandals). After Medusa's death, Pegasus, the winged horse and favourite of the muses, rises from her blood. In Greek mythology, Pegasus is seen as the demigod of lightness.
What does Casal's or Calvino’s lightness have to do with the process of organizing? Lightness arises from clever organizing, thanks to the performative ability of the leader and the openness to complexity in the organization. Lightness becomes a decisive virtue in leadership, self-organization and self-management. (see also Baecker 1994)
The music critic Eric Siblin writes about Bach's suites,
"If I have spent so much time with this music, it is because there is so much to hear in the cello suites. The genre may be baroque, but there are multiple personalities and changes of mood within the suites. I hear folk music that makes a barn shake and postmodern minimalism, spiritual laments and heavy metal riffs, medieval jigs and film music from spy thrillers. But the ideal first encounter with music is probably the same for most listeners as it was for me back then: no preconceived ideas. Just connect the notes and a story emerges." (Siblin 2010)
The response to Casals' suites went beyond the musical. At the beginning of the Spanish dictatorship, Casals went into exile in France and remained an advocate of democracy, peace and freedom throughout his life. He insisted on being called "Pau" (instead of Pablo). The Catalan word "Pau" means peace. Eric Siblin also gives Casals' work a political dimension: "During the period of dictatorships in 20th century Europe, the notes on Casals' anti-fascist cello became bullets" (ibid., p. 12). Mstislav Rostropovich, the Soviet citizen who was expatriated in 1974, also aimed at an epic dimension of the Bach suites when he spontaneously played the suites at Checkpoint Charlie the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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