Guilhermina Suggia - Legacy

Legacy

Suggia bequeathed her Stradivarius cello to the Royal Academy of Music in London, to be sold to fund a scholarship for young cellists. The Suggia Gift, established in 1955, has since 1995 been administered by the Musicians' Benevolent Fund. It has been won by cellists including Rohan de Saram (1955), Jacqueline du Pré(1956), Robert Cohen (1967–1971), Hafliði Hallgrímsson, Steven Isserlis, Raphael Wallfisch and Julian Lloyd Webber. In 2010 it was announced that the 2011 Suggia Gift would be run in association with the 2011 International Guilhermina Suggia Festival, held in her native city.

The large auditorium at Casa da Música in Porto is named Sala Suggia in her honour.

TAP Portugal, national airline, named one of its airplanes, an Airbus A319, after her.

Suggia made a small number of gramophone recordings. They include Haydn's D major Concerto with John Barbirolli and Saint-Saëns's A minor Concerto with Lawrence Collingwood. They were reissued on compact disc in 1989.

Probably the most famous image of Suggia is the oil portrait by the Welsh artist Augustus John, whose daughter Amaryllis Fleming later became a well-known cellist herself. This picture was begun in 1920 but not finished till 1923. It was shown at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1924, bought by an American but later returned to England and presented to the Tate Gallery. The painting measures 186 X 165 cm. The Manchester Guardian wrote of this work that it "will serve to remind future generations that here was a musician who matched the nobility of her art with that of her presence on the concert platform." Photographs of Suggia by Alvin Langdon Coburn are held in the George Eastman House Still Photograph Archive and a photographic portrait by Bertram Park is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.