How did Casals find the Bach Cello Suites?

In a second-hand shop in Barcelona at thirteen, looking through a bundle of music with his father. He bought the score, took it home, and practised the suites every day for twelve years before he would perform one in public.

They had been treated as exercises. Nobody played them as concert works - they were regarded as technical studies, dry material for developing the left hand, and were published and taught that way. Casals's recordings in the 1930s established them as among the greatest music written for any instrument, and no cellist since has been able to avoid them.

He also stopped playing in public for political reasons and stayed stopped. After Franco won the Spanish Civil War, Casals went into exile and refused to perform in any country that recognised the regime, which included almost all of them - a silence he maintained for years at the height of his fame. He played at the White House for Kennedy in 1961 at 84, having declined for decades, and said the exile was the only decision of his life he had never doubted.