Pablo Casals discovered the Bach cello suites for modern players

The argument

Proponents of Pablo Casals's claim to primacy argue that greatness on an instrument is not only a matter of playing it better than anyone else, but of changing what the instrument is understood to be for. Today musicians regard Bach's six cello suites as the most revered works written for the cello, and it is easy to assume they always held that place. They did not. At the time Casals came to them they were viewed as technical warm-up exercises, material a player used to loosen the hands before turning to the repertoire that counted. Casals spent years practising the pieces and eventually became the first musician to perform them in public, treating as concert works what his contemporaries treated as preparation. After he recorded his interpretation in 1936, the suites came to be regarded as works of art that any cellist must master to be seriously considered a master of the instrument. The scale of that shift is audible in the way cellists since have spoken of them: asked about the importance of the pieces, the cellist Lluís Claret said, 'It's like our bible.' The argument therefore rests on consequence rather than on virtuosity alone. A performer is ordinarily measured by playing that ends when the concert does; Casals, on this view, altered the permanent contents of every cellist's education and the standard by which cellists are judged, and he did so by recognising an artistic value in neglected material that nobody else had heard in it. Every serious player who has since worked through the suites is working inside a canon he established, and the instrument's central repertoire is central because of him. Because his influence reaches past his own playing into the entire culture of the cello, proponents conclude that Casals is the greatest cellist of all time.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While Casals did have a significant impact on the cello community, this impact alone is not enough for him to be considered the greatest cellist of all time. He merely laid the foundations for the greatest cellists of all time by popularizing the Bach suites.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The suites were published and in circulation long before Casals, so "discovered" is doing metaphorical work; the premise supports the claim that he changed how they were regarded, which is a fact about reception rather than about playing. [Rejecting P2] Changing an instrument's culture is an achievement of advocacy and repertoire, and the counter's objection stands: laying the foundation on which later players built is entirely compatible with some of them surpassing him, which is what "greatest cellist" is usually taken to compare.