Henri Dutilleux is 97 and still writing music but, although he’s been active for 70 years, he hasn’t really written much: about 30 works (many of them modern masterpieces). He’s extremely self-critical, works very slowly and has abandoned many projects, most famously an opera and a concertante piece for clarinet. He is in very frail health nowadays (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krhI5M2EWPs), so it is unlikely the he will add much to his work list which is unfortunate.
Tchaikovsky was planning to write a cello concerto after his 6th symphony. He may even have started working on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cello_Concerto_%28Tchaikovsky%29). Unfortunately, he didn’t have the time to complete it. Now, that’s something I would have loved to hear! It seems that he also intended to write a flute concerto. That would have been the only concerto for a wind instrument by a major romantic composer…
Baron von Swieten did keep the flame alive and introduced Mozart to JS Bach’s music, but I doubt 20 years more would have done much for Bach himself who was hopelessly out of style by the 1730s. CPE and JC were the two famous Bach composers; Bach senior was mostly known, if at all, for his mad organ-playing skilz.
If we’re looking at DWEM composers I’d much rather gift the extra years to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, one of the greatest unsung composers of the 18th century. His comic intermezzo La Serva Padrona was the most influential precursor to comic opera, while his Stabat Mater utterly changed the form of the sacred music for the rest of the century. And he died of TB at just age 26. Maybe his career was a fluke and he would have spent the next 20 years going out of fashion too but who knows?
As for living people, I think we’ve got to go with Terry Pratchett. Twenty more years of books, with a fully functioning brain? Hells yes.
I hadn’t realized he was one of those guys - one of those people who wasn’t recognized for his greatness until after his death (even though, as it turns out, that’s in the opening blurb of his Wiki page. :smack:) It took me a while to get past pop music and into other genres, especially orchestral/chamber/classical music, but Bach was always easy. Maybe it was because I knew what it was, but when I first heard Erbarme Dich from the St. Matthew Passion, it seemed obvious that it was something…awesome. In the old sense of the word, you know?
The contents of the link are new to me (obviously) and utterly fascinating. Thank you!
I do the cruelty around here. It’s in the RhymerFaq. The only reason I have not dispatched a team back in time to castrate his father before his birth is that I prefer to think of him hanging from a gibbet while crows peck out his eyes.
If we could bring back the dead, it would be H. Beam Piper, the sci-fi author. Hopefully he’d get the help he needed for depression.
For the living I would second the motion for Judi Dench.
P.S. Skald, have you ever hired out the continua craft for sight seeing? I’d love to go back in time, the the early part of the 20th century, to see my maternal grandparents in their youth.
