On the afternoon of October 24, 1958, Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Katherine went to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It was not just any Friday. Pau Casals returned to play in the United States after not having done so in the last thirty years due to the collusion policy of the countries allied with the Franco dictatorship. The Secretary General of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, had invited him to play on the thirteenth anniversary of the founding of the Organization and the musician had accepted, considering the venue neutral territory. It was the first time that the artist played at the United Nations. He would still do it on two more occasions, in the years 1963 and 1971.
From the stalls, the North American theoretical physicist of Jewish origin listened as Casals, at 81 years old, interpreted together with the pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski the Sonata No. 2 in D Major for cello and piano by his admired Bach.
Oppenheimer – star of the biopic directed by Christopher Nolan that is sweeping theaters – observed the musician who that spring had positioned himself against the nuclear arms race.
At the beginning of May Casals had supported the manifesto of his friend Albert Schweitzer. The Franco-German musician and theologian, Nobel Peace Prize winner five years earlier, had called for an end to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“It is incredible that civilized men can always continue to build new and more destructive weapons instead of putting energy into making this a happier and more beautiful world,” Casals had said. Adding that it would not play in the United States or in the USSR if they did not sign a disarmament agreement. After having created the first atomic bomb in July 1945 with the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer, at 54, was the one who could best understand the danger of not stopping.
After the performance, the cellist gave a short speech. “The world has never been closer to catastrophe. The extraordinary scientific discoveries that, in the course of our century, have been achieved by various great intellects in their search for knowledge, are now exploited by the manufacture of instruments whose destructive capacity is monstrous. The concert and the speech, broadcast by CBS and broadcast by more than seventy stations on five continents, solidified the image of Pau Casals as a symbol of peace.
At the end of the act, the Oppenheimers, impressed by the convictions of that fragile-looking musician, went to greet Casals and his Puerto Rican wife, Marta Montañez.
From the outset they had a point in common. The musician had lived on the island of Puerto Rico for two years, after leaving Prada de Conflent. The physicist was saying that he had bought a piece of land in Saint John, one of the United States Virgin Islands, less than two hundred kilometers away. What they had created during their professional careers was very different, but the recognition of each other's talents created an attraction between them.
At that time, moreover, the physicist was a despised man. In the midst of the witch hunt, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy had been accused of ties to communism due to his past friendships and, among other things, for having sent money to Spanish Republican exiles. Removed from his position as political advisor on nuclear issues and marginalized from the US administration of President Dwight Eisenhower for his criticism of nuclear proliferation and the hydrogen bomb program.
Oppenheimer concentrated on classes, research, and traveled the world lecturing. At the beginning of 1960, the University of Puerto Rico invited him to give a talk on the Río Piedras campus. As soon as he found out, he wrote to the musician. La Vanguardia has located in the Oppenheimer collection of the Library of Congress of the United States, in Washington, and in the Casals collection of the National Archive of Catalonia the unpublished correspondence between the two from this moment.
On January 14, the physicist from the Institute for Advanced Studies that he directed in Princeton reminded Casals that after the "great occasion" of the concert in New York they had arranged to visit him in Puerto Rico. And he announced that he would go on February 15. "I have heard that his health has not been good, but if you will allow him a visit, it would be our honor and great pleasure to meet you." The musician at the end of the month responded enthusiastically. It will be a pleasure and an honor to receive you any day and time that suits you. We look forward to seeing you. With admiration and cordial greetings."
Oppenheimer gave a conference in Río Piedras on February 17 about the role of science in society, but in unfavorable circumstances. The university auditorium had deplorable acoustics which the local press, such as The Island Times, complained about.
To fix it, the governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, the great endorser of the physicist, was absent due to commitments in Washington, as confirmed by the correspondence between the two that is kept in the fund of the latter in his homonymous foundation in San Juan.
Oppenheimer himself, moreover, was not feeling well. A heavy pipe smoker, seven years later he would die of throat cancer. “It was a shame and a sense of loss that I had to put aside the high honor and great pleasure of calling him last week. The doctor would not let me do anything more than the minimum required by my visit to the University, and he was really too sick to be a good guest ”. The physicist thus apologized to Casals, on February 25, already back in Princeton.
To make it worse, the musician himself, who lived in Isla Verde, on the outskirts of San Juan, had not been in a position to go listen to him either. "I myself was not feeling too well," Casals replied four days later. The place also brought back bad memories. In April 1957 he had suffered a heart attack while rehearsing with the orchestra. “I felt bad that he was not in condition during his visit. And of course I was very disappointed not to see it. I wish that next time it will be different and I will have the honor and pleasure of his visit”, he added.
What at first seemed like a simple matter did not come to fruition for health reasons for both of them. Oppenheimer informed Casals that the University of Puerto Rico had insisted that he return the following year and he hoped that the meeting would be possible then. It was not. Governor Luis Muñoz maintained a continuous correspondence with the physicist with the intention of creating in the state an equivalent of the Institute that he directed in Princeton.
Oppenheimer even prepared estimates, but his death left the project unfinished. It is unknown if the American came to visit the musician from the Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico later.
There is no record either that the physicist and the musician met again in the United States. Oppenheimer was not on the list of attendees at the White House in 1961 for the Casals concert, invited by the new president John F. Kennedy —rehabilitator of the public figure of the physicist—, nor is it known that he went to the United Nations headquarters in the year 1963. As if fate wanted to convey some message, the man who represented the deadliest destruction and what symbolized peace had not been able to meet calmly to get to know each other in depth.
