Artists whose names will continue well into the future ...

[Lance]

Names like Rembrandt, Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, da Vinci, van Gogh, Rodin, Chaucer, Dickens, Dickinson, Tolstoy ... a never-ending list. But as performing artists are concerned, there will be a few only because their art will live on through recordings and that media will be changing, meaning much will fall to the wayside. But WHO might be some of those performing artists we hold in high esteem today who will win the prize on being remembered?

My thoughts: Artur Schnabel, Horowitz, Callas, Flagstad, Bernstein (maybe). And that list could go on (please make some recommendations), but even names like Artur Rubinstein, Toscanini, Furtwängler, Szell, etc., will fade with time ... like most of us will fade. Schnabel, most likely for what he did with Beethoven, Horowitz because there are/were few like him, Callas because of her life/history/career, Flagstad as one of the greatest of Wagnerian singers. As long as there is some form of recordings, many will cherish name, like we all have digging into the past from the days of 78s. Will people like Casals, Heifetz, Igor Levit, Hamelin live far into the future? Too hard to say from what I see being in academia and talking with young people, many who have no idea who some of these people are.

Just something I was thinking about listening to music on a cold, gray, dreary day in Upstate New York and observing how the world around me is still in a state of mess, confusion, and lots of unhappiness. (Music remains the best medicine if you are in any way depressed.)

[Belle]

I think you've named many of those artists who will survive in the musical imagination in perpetuity. Thanks to the recorded medium, largely. But what of famous musicians of the 19th century who have lived on because of their links to great composers: for example, Joseph Joachim, Hans von Bulow, Arthur Nikisch. Just three, quickly off the top of my head.

https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/ ... r-nikisch/

You are so right that music is the ultimate antidote for whatever ails us in society and on a personal level too. We could substitute music for some of these images Keats uses here, though God knows he had every reason to be depressed and to remain that way!!

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies