Pau Casals asked that his works remain sealed for forty years and that future musicians decide whether they deserved to be published. This project received the decisive support of the Pau Casals Foundation and the Robert Gerhard Foundation.

Cellist Lluís Claret (Casals’s pupil and godson) invited me to take on the review of the manuscripts and the comparison of versions. Working closely with him, I prepared materials for performance and publication, aligning sources and settling variants with the care these pages demand. To perform this task with rigor, I applied what I learned from my teacher Luca Chiantore, who taught me to exercise the utmost care and rigor in musicological work and in reviewing original sources.

The work culminated in three milestones:

• The world premiere within the Pau Casals Festival in El Vendrell, broadcast live internationally.

• The first recording of Casals’s works for cello and piano.

• The first printed edition of these pieces, released by Boileau Music.

Above all, I treasure the private audition for Marta Casals, Pau Casals’s widow, where we presented the works for the first time and discussed each piece in depth. The guidance of Lluís Claret, an incomparable mentor for me, was transformative.

I worked for many years with the Claret-Mora family; each of them helped me grow, both as a musician and as a person.