There's a moment about 33 minutes into the new documentary about cellist Jacqueline du Pré in which we see her stop at a store to buy some grapes. The footage is in black and white; it’s evidently mid-1960s London, when she was in her early 20s and her short-lived career was nearing its peak. After the transaction is completed, she walks up the street, and just after she passes a parked bicycle it spontaneously falls over for no apparent reason, as if even inanimate objects weren’t immune to her infectious life force that entranced everyone who met her or heard her play.
Jacqueline Mary du Pré should have turned 80 on January 26, about two months ago. That's not such an old age; it doesn’t seem like too much to ask that she should still be with us. But she died at the age of 42, having spent her last fourteen years in a retirement forced by multiple sclerosis.
Yo-Yo Ma serves as the film’s narrator, and in his introduction he says: “The term genius is sometimes bandied about as something we don't quite understand. And in Jackie's case I think it actually applies, because we use the term ‘transcending technique’. Jackie was able to take that to the nth degree. The scaffolding of technique was so secure that she could leap dozens of steps into, I think, the spirit world, which is herself, her sense of joy, her sense of abandon, her sense of being in the moment, her sense of just celebrating life, being alive. And that is what, I think, what all art aspires toward, and that music is a translation of that that we feel, and the fact that she achieves that is her genius."
Let's get this out of the way: Jacqueline du Pré was indeed a great artist. She wasn't just "promising", the implication being that we were denied the fullness of her gifts by her early demise; she delivered, and fortunately we have the receipts, a rich legacy of audio and video recordings documenting her playing, and, to a certain extent, her personality as well. She did not coast on her looks and charm while she was an active performer, and her reputation is not the unearned result of a cultish obsession with those whose lives were cut short. If you have heard otherwise, it's the unfortunate result of a smear campaign (that included a major motion picture) by those who somehow thought that her success robbed them of their own. (Families can be toxic.) So it's fitting that for her eightieth birthday we are gifted with a new documentary that serves as a welcome corrective to all the sordidness.
That's not to say that she wasn't a little odd, and that there wasn't some sort of magic going on. Even those who knew her very well at her peak on the earthy plane seemed to feel that her feet didn't quite touch the ground.
As Daniel Barenboim, her musical collaborator and husband, put it: "She had sensitivity and instinctive understanding of music like very few, and was therefore able to make every musical performance so alive that you had the feeling that she was actually inventing the music at that very moment."
She also seemed to bring out the best in people. I have met Pinchas Zukerman and watched him give a master class and can attest that he is not someone who seems particularly appreciative of the majority of humanity with whom he is forced to share the planet. But watching him interact with Jackie in rehearsal footage from the 70s you see him fully alive and passionate and fun-loving, relishing his clearly deep connection with her, and in talking about her he waxed poetic:
"In some ways I think she was probably the greatest human being I have ever met, without any pretense. She was simple, she was loving, she was carefree, we all knew her smile...when it comes to the playing, the actual playing itself, there was a natural gift she was born with that is hard to explain; the only way I can explain it a little bit is essentially in three words: the mind, the heart, and the stomach. She played mainly from the stomach."
The film features many other great musicians as well, including Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, John Barbirolli, and her teacher (du Pré uses the term “cello daddy”) William Pleeth. The word everyone comes back to in describing her playing is “intuitive.” She apparently had little curiosity about music history or other scholarly matters, but her innate sense of musicianship more than made up for it, with an unerring sense of style and phrasing. But she was a thoroughly grounded musician and not just a virtuoso: we see her play the piano with panache, get some impressive sounds out of a violin that she holds like a cello, and demonstrate the tunes her mother would prepare for her, singing and playing at the same time.
She gave her debut recital at Wigmore Hall at age sixteen in 1961, and her star ascended as the decade progressed and she came of age. She was part of a generation of British artists that represented a youth movement and cultural renaissance that carried a lot of weight: after losing a substantial amount of two generations to the two world wars, here at last was a generation who would be allowed to grow up and create the future of the rapidly dwindling empire. The trio of du Pré, Zuckerman and Barenboim was kind of the classical music equivalent of The Beatles: young, dynamic, touring the world and recording at Abbey Road. And du Pré’s recording of the Elgar concerto, considered the supreme masterpiece of British symphonic music and a searing memorial to those lost in WWI, took on so much significance and emotional weight it’s a testament to her artistry that she transcended its historical baggage to deliver a singular interpretation that was raw, passionate and seemingly spontaneous, a tribute to lost youth that we now hear as a foreshadowing of her own tragedy.
I was born the same year as her debut recital, and began my exploration of classical music when I was eight, which soon turned into a focus on the cello. It was Pablo Casals' recording of the Bach Suites that set me on that path, and Jacqueline du Pré's recording of the Haydn concertos that kept me on it. Her performance of the D major concerto in particular felt like a space I could live in; it's like we can hear her leisurely finding new tunes to play beautifully, punctuated by episodes of virtuoso drama that she played effortlessly, always infused with lyricism and a constant sense of savoring every moment. She was a tremendous musical influence on me as well as being my only real celebrity crush, and according to the film I was hardly alone; everyone was in love with her.
She is also the rare cellist of her generation who made a virtue of an unfortunate tendency of the style at the time to Emphasize. Every. Note. The mid-20th century was infected with teachers of string instruments telling their students to use their whole bow all the time and vibrate constantly. Fortunately there has come a more recent generation of players who can speak as well as sing through their instruments and use more subtle color and nuance, but teachers like mine and du Pré's perpetuated this very intense style of playing that can create fatigue for both listeners and players. But she managed to make that emphatic quality sing AND speak, and just added to her quality of being larger than life - or perhaps just inhabiting life deeper than anyone else.
Itzhak Perlman makes a touching observation that "Jackie had it worse" than he did because he grew up with polio and learned to accept it, whereas MS took so much away from her. She tried the best she could to soldier on, teaching and making occasional public appearances in her wheelchair, but she never really found her second act. She spent a lot of time in her later years listening to her own recordings. She could not escape the spell of her own enchanting youthful self.
She was certainly a force of nature that could not be easily controlled. She was alarmingly cavalier in how she treated her priceless Stradivarius; in the film's first scene we see her playing its body like a set of bongos, and we later see her practicing on a moving train. She had friction with some of her collaborators - as Barenboim put it, "mere mortals" who couldn't keep up with her uncanny sense of finding the right feel for a piece of music without analyzing or discussing it. And, without getting too deep into the gossipy weeds, it seems that the routine demonization of Barenboim concerning his marriage to her is a bit unfair since her own behavior was not consistently saintly. But there are tales to tell about many famous male cellists that we somehow never hear about that are far less forgivable - and when you can sense that your time is short it's understandable if you skip a few steps, since you're concentrating on making every note count.
Jacqueline du Pré: Genius and Tragedy premieres Friday, March 28 at 9PM. Watch live on WETA PBS or WETA Metro, livestream on weta.org, or stream on-demand for free on the PBS App.
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