🇬🇧 Jacqueline du Pré

Biography

There is a recording made in 1965, when Jacqueline du Pré was nineteen years old, that classical musicians still use as a reference point for what the cello can express. She was performing Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor — a late, elegiac work that Elgar wrote in 1919, after the destruction of the First World War, and which had been considered a minor piece of his output until du Pré played it. Her performance — large-scaled, deeply personal, technically sovereign — transformed the concerto's reputation overnight. It is now considered one of the great works in the repertoire, inseparable from her interpretation. She was a teenager.

Jacqueline du Pré was born January 26, 1945, in Oxford, England, to a musical family — her mother was a pianist and teacher who recognized her daughter's gift almost immediately. At four, du Pré heard the cello on the radio and told her mother she wanted to play that instrument. She received her first cello at four and a half. By five she was producing a tone that her mother's professional colleagues found extraordinary. By eight she had begun studying with William Pleeth, the cellist who would remain her primary teacher and most influential musical guide, and who later said that she arrived at his studio already playing with an emotional intelligence that adult students rarely achieved.

She won the Suggia Gift — the most prestigious award in British cello study — at age ten, which provided funding for continued training. She studied subsequently with Paul Tortelier in Paris and Mstislav Rostropovich in Moscow, two of the great cellists of the twentieth century, both of whom described her as already fully formed as an artist, requiring guidance rather than instruction. Her technique was not built painstakingly over decades; it emerged, as if fully developed, from a natural affinity for the instrument so complete that it struck her teachers as something outside normal musical development.

Her professional debut recital was at the Wigmore Hall in London in March 1961, when she was sixteen. The performance was reviewed by the major London music critics and described in terms reserved for the rarest debuts: as the emergence of a complete artist, already in possession of everything required for a major career. Within two years she was performing with the leading British orchestras, recording for EMI, and appearing at the Edinburgh Festival and the BBC Proms. In 1965 her recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto — made with Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra — was released and changed her status from promising young talent to indispensable major artist.

Her playing is characterized above all by emotional intensity and a physical engagement with the instrument that was almost theatrical in its expressiveness. She played with her entire body — swaying, leaning, appearing almost to merge with the cello — in a way that made performances visually as well as sonically overwhelming. Critics and audiences used words like "passionate," "abandoned," and "overwhelming" to describe her performances, reaching for emotional language because technical language seemed insufficient.

In 1967 she married the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. Their musical partnership was as celebrated as their personal one: she performed regularly as soloist with his conducting, and their recordings together of Beethoven's cello sonatas and Brahms's cello sonatas are still considered among the finest available. She performed with every major conductor of the era — Barbirolli, Giulini, Zubin Mehta, Barenboim — and in every major concert hall in Europe, North America, and Israel.

In 1973, at the age of 28, du Pré was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease progressed rapidly, stripping away first the sensitivity in her fingers and then her ability to hold the bow. She gave her last public performance in February 1973 and never played the cello professionally again. She spent the remaining fourteen years of her life first working as a teacher, then increasingly confined by the disease's progression. She died October 19, 1987, in London, aged 42. She had been performing for twelve years.

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