Blessed and cursed

Inspired cellist Jacqueline Du Pre would have been 60 today.

They called her Smiley, for the wide, radiant glow of joy that rarely left her face. Her bow gouging into the cello string, her long, red-gold hair flying around her silk-clad shoulders, she played with an uninhibited physicality that could conjure up extremes of elemental ferocity and tenderness.

Her career, which once had a momentum that would leave a comet breathless, came to an abrupt end when she was struck down by multiple sclerosis in 1973 at the age of 28. The disease killed her in 1987. She would have celebrated her 60th birthday today.

But even now, more than 30 years after her last concert, Jacqueline Du Pre is rarely out of the limelight. Her recordings still sell in droves. Christopher Nupen's film Jacqueline Du Pre - In Portrait was the highest-selling classical DVD of 2004 in Britain, and surely no one who has seen his film of her performing the Elgar Cello Concerto can hear the work again without remembering her.

Yet critics often lambasted her unusual technique, her extravagantly physical style and her relentless intensity. Her reputation suffered from Anand Tucker's notorious 1998 feature film Hilary and Jackie, which displayed a less salubrious side of her family and personal life.

But despite critics' nit-picking and the public washing of dirty laundry, Du Pre remains an icon, a figure whose talent, radiance, apparently fairytale life and tragic death add up to more than the sum of their parts.

What exactly was it about her that could, and still can, inspire such devotion? How much of her mystique can be attributed to her extraordinary and terrible life story?

Just how accurate were those damning reviews? Why does her memory still burn so brightly?

Du Pre's life is well-documented. Born into a middle-class family in Oxford, she heard a cello for the first time aged four and declared that this was the sound she wanted to make. Soon her family was astonished by the fervour with which she exclaimed, "I love my cello so much."

 

News of her talent travelled fast. She studied with William Pleeth, calling him her "cello daddy", and missed large chunks of school to focus on music.

Her godmother helped to buy her a Stradivarius. And her Wigmore Hall debut, at 16, launched a career that soon took in an EMI record contract, concertos with the greatest conductors of her day, and duo partnerships with some of the finest young pianists, including Daniel Barenboim - whom she married in Israel in 1967 amid a whirl of public adulation.

She and Barenboim were at once an international celebrity couple, a classical Posh and Becks.

But by 1970, Du Pre was suffering from peculiar symptoms, including episodes of numbness, intense fatigue and a sensation of weakness in her limbs. The symptoms came and went. Time and again doctors dismissed them as psychosomatic.

Convinced she was heading for a nervous breakdown, Du Pre cancelled her engagements for six months and went to stay with her sister, Hilary, and her family, where allegedly she had an affair with her brother-in-law.

Her marriage to Barenboim had not proved as much of a fairytale as its image suggested. Plagued by a sense of intellectual inferiority and inadequate stamina (Barenboim is still legendarily energetic), she had left him behind, as well as her cello, for those few months, in a trial separation.

Afterwards she returned to him and to her concert life - but her attempts at resuming the latter soon foundered on her physical problems. At last she was advised to see a neurologist, who diagnosed multiple sclerosis. Her performing career was over.

During the 14 years of her slow decline into complete incapacity, Barenboim continued to look after her devotedly in London. Although he never left her, eventually, during her last years, he set up another home in Paris with the Russian pianist, Elena Bashkirova, whom he later married.

Du Pre was a modern legend of someone blessed yet cursed, like the Kennedy family, Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana. Since her death, has legend overwhelmed reality?

Responses today to her recordings and films are coloured by knowledge of her fate. But there's no doubt, when you talk to those who knew and worked with her, that her blessings were every bit as powerful as her curse.

The British cellist Raphael Wallfisch, who is spearheading two days of events in Britain to mark Du Pre's 60th birthday, has never forgotten his childhood experiences of seeing her in action.

"My mother, the cellist Anita Lasker, was a member of the English Chamber Orchestra and used to take me with her to rehearsals and recording sessions," he recalls. "I was present when Du Pre recorded the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto with Barenboim conducting, and I remember those sessions as if it were yesterday.

"The atmosphere was like a party. Du Pre was full of joy and smiles, everyone was having a good time. You'd never have imagined it was a recording session."

Stephen Kovacevich, her former duo partner, remembers this feeling too.

"When I walked on stage with her, I looked forward to the concert and never felt imprisoned by remembering little details, because the performance would be no-holds barred. She had a joy about her which helped me too.

"She wasn't religious, but she used to say, 'I have a God-given talent and I feel it's my privilege to share it with my friends.' That was absolutely genuine."

The film director Christopher Nupen vividly recalls meeting Du Pre for the first time in 1962. He was sharing a flat with the guitarist John Williams, with whom the teenaged Du Pre was to make a recording.

"She came to the flat to rehearse. We greeted her at the door and she was unmistakably shy. But when we walked down to the kitchen, she strode like an Amazon. There was an immense confidence in her being and her movement, but shyness in her personality.

"That struck me and never left me. I see a parallel with these contradictory images in her music-making. Her depth of perception, both human and musical, was incredible. But she felt inferior because she hadn't had much ordinary education."

Nupen adds: "The conductor Sir John Barbirolli says, in the film, 'Sometimes she's accused of excessive emotions, but I love it. When you're young you should have an excess of everything. If you haven't an excess, what are you going to pare off as the years go by?"'

Du Pre's "excessive emotion" was one of many aspects of her playing that provoked the critics. Everything was considered excessive - the tone, the way she "threw herself around" as she played, the portamenti (slides between notes) - except for desired qualities that were sometimes absent, such as understanding of form.

On one hand, as Wallfisch points out, Du Pre's apparent shortcomings were a sign of something more sinister than questionable musical taste.

"In retrospect, one understands that a lot of the extra energy she was putting in was simply because she couldn't feel her fingers," he explains. "She was literally feeling her way between the notes."

But also, as Kovacevich recalls, she had something more significant to offer than precision. "Once I raised some pedantic point in a rehearsal - the composer had written forte and she was playing something else. She responded, 'Once the composer has finished the piece, it's mine!'

"That's not a politically correct comment, but it works. It means you give all your love, commitment and joy to the music. As for critics, I have the feeling that there is nothing more threatening to them than something that is absolutely wonderful."

He has a point. Charisma as compelling and universally communicative as Du Pre's is an enormous threat, because its force renders academic correctness redundant. And academic correctness is often the only asset that many other praised performers, and critics, possess.

A Jacqueline Du Pre comes along once in a lifetime - someone with such personal radiance that no human or instrumental defects can interfere with their power over the audience.

Among musicians, perhaps only Maria Callas or Vladimir Horowitz also fall into this bracket. None of them would be acceptable to a musical competition jury. Measurement against "historically correct" slide-rules would do them no favours.

But faced with the charisma of a Jackie, such concerns evaporate. Her sound seems to go straight from her soul to the listener's. Nothing else really matters.

Nupen's films have preserved much of Du Pre's personal magic, shot in an involving, informal manner unprecedented in music documentaries at the time. A Portrait of Jacqueline du Pre shows her on a train, gleefully strumming her cello like a guitar.

It's tempting to wonder whether they have even helped to create the Du Pre legend. But Nupen insists that if she still strikes such a chord in people who never saw her perform live, that is to her credit and not his.

- INDEPENDENT