Special interview by phone to honor our Keynote Speaker Madam Marta Casals Istomin.

The former President of the Manhattan School of Music, Marta Angélica Montañez y Martinez was bom in Puerto Rico where she began her music studies at the age of six under the tutelage of her uncle. Rafael Montañez was a poet and newspaperman as well as a musician who taught her the fundamentals of the violin and solfeggio, and who was instrumental in her transferring, upon graduation from public school at the top of her class, to New York's Marymount School of the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Mary. During her four years there, she briefly considered devoting her life to work in a Catholic religious order. She also began to study the cello with Lieff Rosanoff at The Mannes College of Music, making astonishingly rapid progress. Uncle Rafael took her to the Perpignan Festival in 1951 (when she was 15) and asked the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals-whose mother came from Puerto Rico — to hear her play. Impressed with the girl's natural talent, he told her to go back to New York and that he would accept her as a student when Rosanoff judged her ready.

In the spring of 1954, Marta Montañez graduated maxima cum laude from Marymount. To her credit was an award for being a top Latin student in New York State, a considerable proficiency as a cellist and singer, and a reputation for being well organized, fast, efficient, energetic, and generous. With these promising attributes in her kit bag, she went back to Europe to see if the Maestro, then at the Prades (France) Festival, might make good on his offer to take her on as a student. He did, soon feeling a personal responsibility for her. There are, from that time, touching photographs of Casals inscribed to Martita and signed "Tío Pablo," and by the 1955 Festival she was identified as his favorite student. From Prades she accompanied him to the Zermatt Summer Academy of Music where Casals held master classes in the interpretation of cello literature. It was during that summer, too, that she first came to meet two music enthusiasts whose personalities were immediately and indelibly inscribed in her memory: Albert Schweitzer and Charlie Chaplin. During the year that followed, 1956, a new and very special festival was organized and Marta was of inestimable help in managing the welter of logistics inevitable with such a venture. Pablo Casals was music director, Alexander Schneider assistant director of San Juan's Festival Casals, with the first festival scheduled for the following year.

Three events occurred in rapid succession in 1957: Casals suffered a major heart attack; the first Festival Casals took place as scheduled but supervised by the faithful Sasha Schneider; and, in August, the music world took note of the marriage of Casals to his student and assistant, the vivacious Martita. She was to be his helpmate and the love of his life until his death in 1973 at the age of 97.

*Marta Casals Istomin will be appearing in a special telephone interview from her home in Washington, D.C.