Guilhermina Suggia (1885-1950) was one of the first women to make a professional career of playing the cello. A child prodigy, Suggia began to study the cello in her native Portugal at age 5, graduated from Leipzig Conservatory at age 18, and went on to become one of the most celebrated musicians of her era. Her artistry was ranked alongside that of Pablo Casals, who was her teacher, musical partner, and lover. England's prestigious Suggia Prize is one of her many legacies to the cello-playing world.
Suggia's story is not widely known, and much of what was written on her prior to the last decade is not fully credible. Suggia herself contributed to the mystery and misconceptions by deliberating obscuring parts of her history and destroying personal papers before her death. Most of the documents she left behind are stored in a municipal archive in Matosinhos, Portugal. Some papers are in private hands and in the Fundació Pau Casals in Barcelona. Two books on Suggia by Portugese author Fátima Pombo, one of which is published in a bilingual edition, are valuable sources based on the available documentation. Robert Baldock discusses the relationship between Suggia and Casals in his 1992 biography of the Spanish cellist. In Portugese there also exists a fictional biography by Mário Cláudio. From these sources it is possible to assemble a portrait of a singular virtuosa at work during a period of rapid transformation in women's musical history
