Cellist’s magic touch lives on in the music chants

Press, 7 September 1989, Page 10

Cellist’s magic touch lives on in the music chants

Jacqueline du Pre’s recordings are still best sellers, MARK SEXTON reports.

The haunting tones of Elgar’s Cello, concerto is fitting music for the ghost that is haunting the British best seller charts. Week after week two versions of the concerto, both played by Jacqueline du Pre, vie with each other. The same concerto, played by Julian Lloyd Webber, arguably Britain’s greatest living cellist languishes much lower down, in the charts. Jacqueline du Pre’s music has been as popular since her death, two years ago, as ever it was in her lifetime — a short life in which her passionate rendering of Elgar’s ethereal music made it her own.

Elgar finished composing the concerto in 1918. It was not very well received, and languished until Jacqueline found in her own passion the power Elgar had written into it.

It was the music she too, liked to hear most, after the terrible illness had robbed her of her ability to play. Jacqueline fell in love with the cello in 1948 at the age of three after hearing one played on the radio. When she woke on the morning of her fourth birthday she found a cello by her bed. It was the start of her brilliant career.

At the age of 23 when she was the golden girl of British music, the country’s foremost string player, she met the man who became her husband, Daniel Barenboim.

Although they knew

each other and had spoken on the phone they came face to face at a party given by the pianist, Fou Ts’ong.

“My first meeting with my husband was most remarkable,” Jacqueline was to recall, “The door opened and in came , this very dynamic person. He sat down and we played through something, and to my surprise there was nothing to say. It was as though we had known each other for a very long time.”

Daniel, a feisty Israeli, has also been a child prodigy who made his debut in Buenos Aires at the age of seven. When they met he was already a world renowned pianist and conductor.

. They married in 1967, and were blissfully happy with a life in the fast lane of the international music set. With their particular friends, Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman, they were known as the musical mafia. It was in 1973 that the blow fell. Both Jacqueline and Daniel were at the height of their careers with the world of classical music at their feet. She was 28 and he was 31 when strange tinglings and minor problems that Jacqueline had been experiencing were diagnosed as multiple sclerosis.

The disease rapidly took hold. Jacqueline was to spend 14 years in a wheelchair, with her fac-

ulties slowly diminishing but her spirit fiercely hanging on to her love of music, and of Daniel.

Daniel was like a rock, friends say. He would phone Jacqueline from wherever he was conducting and leave the phone off the hook so that she could hear the concert.

They took the mews house in Kensington that ballerina Margot Fonteyn had converted for her husband, who is also confined to a wheelchair. Even when he was made director of L’Orchestra de Paris, Daniel made the trip to London whenever he could to be with Jacqueline who was being looked after by his mother, Aida, and her devoted, friend and nurse Ruth Ann Canning. .

But there was one secret that Daniel and all Jacqueline’s friends managed to keep from her.. Daniel sought the comfort of another woman. As one of their close friends put it, “There was no way they could have a complete marriage after Jacqueline got multiple sclerosis. Most people were not surprised when they found out about the other woman.”

Russian musician, Helena Bachkirov, shared Daniel’s Paris flat, bore him two sons, and married him 18 months after Jacqueline’s death. But during Jacqueline’s lifetime, Daniel was devoted to her. His final act of devotion came this year when he conducted concerts in aid of his “Jacqueline du Pre Appeal” to raise S6M to provide help for musicians who contract MS.