MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Impressions of Jacqueline du Pre

Jacqueline du Pré is arguably the greatest talent to ever play the cello. She combined mind, heart, body and soul to produce the most expressive tones ever to emanate from the instrument. Shy and at the same time bold, she was not only expressive, but played with precision, fullness and purity of tone.

Jacqueline was born in Oxford on January 26, 1945 into a middle-class family in which music was important: her mother was a fine pianist and a gifted teacher. The French-sounding name came from her father's Channel Island ancestry. Just before her fifth birthday, when she was already showing musical promise, she heard the sound of a cello on the radio and the course of her life was set. )

At ten years old Jacqueline du Pré studied under William Pleeth. She then studied with Casals, Tortelier and Rostropovich. In 1965 she recorded the Elgar Concerto with Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra, a recording which established her stardom. Her unselfishness made her a brilliant chamber music player, collaborating with many of today's greatest names in music. Her friendship with Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta and Pinchas Zuckerman, led to the famous film by Christopher Nupen of their Schubert "Trout" Quintet.

In 1967 she married pianist Daniel Barenboim. TIME magazine wrote, "Thus began one of the most remarkable relationships, personal as well as professional, that music has known since the days of Clara and Robert Schumann." Their marriage led to some fruitful collaboration, evidenced in many recordings with Barenboim as pianist or conductor.

She could not pinpoint the time when she started losing feeling in her fingers, and her arms, as she said, felt like lead. By the fall of 1973 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She continued to teach on occasion, but the deterioration of her health gained momentum and finally, on October 19, 1987, she died at the age of forty-two.