Art & Creativity Quote by Pablo Casals

Casals drops a small grenade into the polite fiction of “faithful performance.” On the surface, he’s talking about notes on a page; underneath, he’s arguing that art begins where obedience ends. “Not to play what is written” isn’t a call to sloppiness or ego. It’s a rebuke to the musician-as-typist, the conservatory-trained technician who can execute every marking yet somehow never makes the room feel anything.

The line works because it flips the expected hierarchy. We treat the score as law and the performer as messenger. Casals insists the opposite: the score is a blueprint, not a building. Interpretation is the act of turning symbols into intention, of deciding what a phrase is trying to do, not merely how it is supposed to sound. That “not” is the key. He’s defining interpretation by what it refuses: dead literalism, the kind that mistakes accuracy for truth.

Context sharpens the provocation. Casals came up in an era when recording technology and modern conservatories were standardizing taste, freezing “definitive” readings into reference versions. He also spent decades as a moral exile, refusing to perform in countries that legitimized Franco’s regime. For him, interpretation wasn’t just musical; it was ethical: the artist is responsible for meaning, not just delivery.

So the quote lands as both a musician’s tip and a cultural position. If you only play what’s written, you’re outsourcing your humanity to ink. Casals is telling you to put it back in.