Editing Pablo Casals (section)

===Childhood and early years===
Casals was born in [[El Vendrell]], [[Catalonia]], Spain. His father, Carles Casals i Ribes, was a parish [[organist]] and [[conducting|choirmaster]]. He gave Casals instruction in piano, songwriting, violin, and organ. He was also a very strict disciplinarian. When Casals was young, his father would pull the piano out from the wall and have him and his brother, Artur, stand behind it and name the notes and the scales that his father was playing. At the age of four, Casals could play the violin, piano and flute; at the age of six he played the violin well enough to perform a solo in public. His first encounter with a cello-like instrument was from witnessing a local travelling [[music of Catalonia|Catalan musician]], who played a cello-strung broom handle. Upon request, his father built him a crude cello, using a [[gourd]] as a sound-box. When Casals was 11 years old, he first heard the real cello performed by a group of traveling musicians, and decided to dedicate himself to the instrument.{{Citation needed|date=October 2010}}

His mother, [[Pilar Defilló Amiguet|Doña Pilar Defilló de Casals]], was born in [[Mayagüez, Puerto Rico]], to parents who were [[Catalans|Catalan]] immigrants in Puerto Rico.<ref name=casa>{{cite web|url=http://www.icp.gobierno.pr/zmh/zmh_noticias.htm |title=Proyecto de Recuperación de la Casa Defilló |publisher=Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña |language=es |access-date=25 January 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070125074336/http://www.icp.gobierno.pr/zmh/zmh_noticias.htm |archive-date=25 January 2007 |url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.hercampus.com/school/uprm/pilar-defillo-house-museum-jewel-be-found|work=Her Campus at University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez |accessdate=2 June 2022| date=14 May 2016|last=Zapata|first=J. Gabriel| title=Pilar Defillo House Museum: A Jewel to be Found}}</ref> In 1888, she took her son to Barcelona, where he was enrolled in the Escola Municipal de Música.<ref name=casa /> There he studied cello, theory, and piano. In 1890, when he was 13, he found a tattered copy of Bach's six cello suites in a second-hand music store in Barcelona. He spent the next 13 years practicing them every day before he would perform them in public for the first time.<ref>{{cite book|first=Eric |last=Siblin |title=The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece |publisher=Atlantic |year=2010}}</ref> Casals would later make his own version of the six suites.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://ovationpress.com/c-84-casals-pablo.aspx|title=Pablo Casals - Cello|publisher=Ovation Press}}</ref> He made prodigious progress as a cellist; on 23 February 1891 he gave a solo recital in Barcelona at the age of fourteen. He graduated from the ''Escola'' with honours five years later.