Living in Crescendo

In the town of Ceiba, Puerto Rico, you’ll find a house known locally as “The Manger,” where the great cellist Pablo Casals spent his last twenty years before his death in 1973. Nearly a century before, in his native Spain, he had heard his first cello, and it conquered him before he conquered it. As a boy, he did little else but practice the Bach cello suites from a worn-out copy his mother gave him, and when a prominent composer heard him and invited him to play for the Spanish royal family, his career soared. At twenty-three, he performed for Queen Victoria, and at eighty-five for President John F. Kennedy at the White House.

The six decades between were a long crescendo upward in the world of music. Casals starred with the great orchestras, won every possible honour, and was acclaimed as the greatest cellist on the planet and perhaps in history. He was so beloved in Spain that when he played before the king, listeners pointed to the royal box and shouted, “This is our king, but Pablo is our emperor!”

In the great man’s last years, his neighbours in Ceiba would listen to the sound of the Bach suites coming from the windows of The Manger. One day, when he was ninety-three, one of them asked him why he continued to practice the cello for three hours every day. Casals replied, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement. . . . I notice myself getting better at this.”

Pablo Casals never stopped playing his music until the day he laid down his bow for the last time at age ninety-seven. He built his capacity, improved his powers, and contributed the best that was in him right to his last breath. When others wondered why he didn’t slow down as he approached the end of his long life, he would tell them, “To retire is to die.” Casals could have explained to them that when the music dies down, it’s called a diminuendo, and when the music swells to life and grows in grandeur, it’s called a crescendo. He was determined that his life would not slip into diminuendo. He lived in crescendo.

Stephen R. Covey:

"Of all the ideas I share in my professional work, I know of no greater one that ignites and empowers others more than my personal motto: Live Life in Crescendo! Your Most Important Work Is Always Ahead of You."