Estou muito contente por estar convosco esta noite, neste
teatro onde Suggia brilhou como intérprete.
(...)Muito obrigada pela vossa presença.
Suggia was a great artist who had a very distinguished career from the time she was a child prodigy until her death in 1950. However, after her death she fell into the shadows. There simply was not a lot of information about her available. In the absence of real information, a lot of stories were told and many Suggia legends took shape. This began to change in the mid-1990s, when Fátima Pombo published two books on Suggia that made use of extensive use of documents stored in the municipal archive in Matosinhos and other documents in the hands of private individuals. Today, thankfully, we can talk about the life and career of Suggia in far more detail and with greater accuracy than we could in the past.
In thinking about what part of Suggia’s life story to talk about with you tonight, I decided to focus on her life in England from approximately 1914 through 1925. These were years of great achievement and high drama, and I thought that some of the details might be less familiar to people here in Portugal.
Prior to World War I Suggia lived in Paris with Pablo Casals. When their relationship ended Suggia eventually moved to London. I say “eventually” because we don’t know exactly when she moved there. Suggia told an interviewer that early in the War she worked as a nurse in France and went to England whenever possible because it was still possible to make music there.
Suggia and Casals visited England together. At some point they were drawn into a group of musical friends that met in the home of Muriel and Paul Draper in the Chelsea section of London. The Drapers were an American couple who moved to London so that Paul could work on his singing career. They were very sociable and charming and they wanted to create a home where musicians could gather and make music informally. So they rented two houses one behind the other, 19 and 19A Edith Grove, and they knocked out a wall in the basement between the two houses, creating the famous “cave.”
This was a room where some of the most famous musicians of the early 20th century would meet after concerts, late at night; and they would play together just for each other until the break of dawn. Musical regulars included pianists Benno Moiseiwisch, Arthur Rubinstein and Harold Bauer, cellists Felix Salmond and May Mukle, violinists Jacques Thibaud and Paul Kochanski, violist Lionel Tertis, Casals and Suggia and many other celebrated musicians. Eugene Goossens said that on one occasion Casals and Suggia went behind a screen so they couldn’t be seen, and each played the cello in turn, challenging the guests to identify which one was playing when. According to Goossens, nobody could tell the two cellists apart. This would have been just before the outbreak of the War, probably 1912 or 1913.
(ANITA MERCIER)