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You have a medical bag and a time machine...

Or maybe Debussy... 55 when he died, not long after En Blanc et Noir - definitely a groundbreaking work. Who can tell where he was headed?
 
For classical music, Schubert was the first name that came to mind for me. For jazz, it's Eric Dolphy - I'd love to know how his music would have developed during the late 1960s and 70s.
 
I think if anything the world of classical music didn't fare too badly considering. Much higher rates of infant mortality in them days and death was never far away which any reading of biographies of e.g Bach or Schubert tells you. A number of composers died before they were 40 but had already produced a good body of work e.g Chopin, Mendelssohn, Bellini, Weber plus Schubert and Mozart. Then a question of what they might have gone on to do, either plough the same furrow and deepen/refine it as Chopin probably would have done (although his furrow was unusually unique!) or continue to write ground-breaking music as I think Schubert might have. Whereas the rock/pop/ jazz world has had lots of unfortunate casualties, quite a few pharmaceutical rather than medical plus those ones due to ill advised plane journeys in terrible weather(!)
 
A little penicillin would probably have enabled either Schubert or Mahler and possibly also Mozart (more debate over what killed him) to survive longer. I'll be greedy and ask for all three to have another 10 years!

Imagine another 10 Mahler symphonies!
And late-period Schubert (including the D960 piano sonata and the D887 quartet) would become middle-period Schubert.
 
Schubert. The works he composed in 1827 and 1828 are among the greatest in their genres. He could have done so much more.
 
Schubert, but if someone else already had him sorted, Robert Schumann, assuming his mental issues could have been eased.
 
schneiderhan said:
Schubert every day of the week. Look at what he'd created by the age of 31. He'd been pretty much on fire since age 15 or something! Though of course there's the unsolvable conundrum of how his music might have sounded had he not been mortally ill. Would we have had lots more Trout quintets.
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Hmm, yes, good point that.

Schubert without the existential angst.
He did write a lot of relative dross along the way imo, as well as the profoundest masterpieces.

Perhaps cure him of the syphilis but not tell him?
A bit mean, but we wouldn't want to be without D. 887,958/9/60 etc and their putative successors.
 
On another forum I started a thread asking which composer if that was the only one you are able to listen to?

My response was Mozart, and as he shuffled off this mortal coil in his mid 30s, I guess I'll be supplying the medical benefits from this thread to him.

The Requiem and Great Mass, Jupiter symphony, late string quartets, quintets, piano and violin sonatas, piano and wind concerti, clarinet quintet, string trio k563 ...
Where next? The mind boggles.
 
jandl100 said:
Hmm, yes, good point that.

Schubert without the existential angst.
He did write a lot of relative dross along the way imo, as well as the profoundest masterpieces.

Perhaps cure him of the syphilis but not tell him?
A bit mean, but we wouldn't want to be without D. 887,958/9/60 etc and their putative successors.
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Dross is not a word often used to describe the music of Schubert, relative or otherwise!
 
Well, I think so. Some of his melodies are horribly trite.
Just think Wanderer Fantasy, urk.
Anyway, opinions will undoubtedly differ.

But string quartets.
D. 887. Where the hell do you go from there? The mind boggles. Well, mine does. Fascinating.

Someone needs to produce a music AI which can predict future works based on extant catalogue. That's the sort of thing AI can be good at; picking out trends and associations that are not at all obvious to the human mind.
Can Beethoven's late quartets be predicted from those up to op. 95?
I'm coming round to the idea that Schubert would be more interesting than Mozart for the medical treatment.
 
Wanderer Fantasy, hmmm, I suppose you might have a point there :D.

I think that a difficult life, however unpleasant for the composer, does give rise to some of the greatest works. On the other hand just think of Sibelius; the state eased all his cares by housing and feeding him with the result that he stopped composing. In modern times it is the old prozac conundrum. Medicate the artist and medicate away their creativity.
 
A few more years of Mahler could have been very interesting with a decent run into the 20th Century. Wonder what would have happened over the First World War period - he could ramped up some more of those funereal marches he was so good at after that!
 
camverton said:
Wanderer Fantasy, hmmm, I suppose you might have a point there :D.

I think that a difficult life, however unpleasant for the composer, does give rise to some of the greatest works. On the other hand just think of Sibelius; the state eased all his cares by housing and feeding him with the result that he stopped composing. In modern times it is the old prozac conundrum. Medicate the artist and medicate away their creativity.
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I wonder how much Alcohol played a part in his declining output though.
 
More to do with self-knowledge, if you ask me... Sibelius thought that he had said pretty much everything he had to say. Listening to the 7th symphony and Tapiola, that seems like a reasonable position for him to have taken.

Bruckner and Brahms (and Liszt!) would all be classed as alcoholics by modern medicine. It didn't stop Brahms and Liszt... but decline attributable to it probably does account for Bruckner's inability to complete the Ninth.
 
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