“The Cello Player”. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
To grasp what music lost, you have to start with what it had. Jacqueline du Pré, English, a cellist, was in the 1960s a phenomenon nobody had seen before: a performer who played with her whole body, her hair, her elbows, a physical joy so visible that purists accused her of excess and audiences adored her without reservation. Her recording of the Elgar concerto, made at twenty with Barbirolli in 1965, is one of those few recordings that changed for good the way a piece is played: since then, anyone who takes on the Elgar is in conversation with her, whether they mean to be or not. Married to Daniel Barenboim in 1967, at the centre of the group of young lions who dominated the scene, she seemed to be at the start of a half-century career.
The first signs arrived as absurd stumbles: fingers that no longer felt the strings, sudden fatigue, a bow that had grown heavy. For months people talked of exhaustion, of psychological crisis, of the price of fame; she herself would later describe the bewilderment of no longer trusting her own hands without knowing why. The diagnosis came in 1973: multiple sclerosis. She was twenty-eight. That year she gave her last concerts, the feeling in her fingers coming and going; then the cello fell silent. She lived another fourteen years, teaching from a wheelchair, supported by her musician friends, until her death in 1987, at forty-two.
Du Pré’s story has become, over the years, the stuff of books and of a much-debated film, with the family divided over the memoirs: it is not our ground, and we will not step onto it. What concerns a music magazine is something else. First: the repertoire. In a concert career of barely ten years, du Pré left recordings that remain the reference after sixty years, and that says something important against the rhetoric of long maturation: certain interpretive truths arrive whole at twenty, or not at all. Second: the body. Her story recalls, in the cruellest way, what the profession prefers to forget and what Malibran’s story had already cried out: the performer is an athlete, and the real instrument is biological, fragile, irreplaceable. Every time the Elgar of that 1965 disc starts up again, with that first attack that feels like a door flung open, all her health of that time is in it, intact for ever: it is the closest thing to physical immortality that recording technology has ever given anyone. And if this story touches something close to you, or to someone you love, multiple sclerosis associations exist and they listen: the best way to honour Jacqueline du Pré is this too.