GOLDEN GIRL

Documentary maker Christopher Nupen made several groundbreaking films with Jacqueline du Pré. Here he shares his memories of the legendary British cellist who tragically died at the age of 42 after battling with multiple sclerosis

An interview for documentary Jacqueline

Jacqueline du Pré (1945–87) was endowed by nature with the most prodigious gifts. Among them, she was given a truly virtuoso mother, who taught her to tap musical rhythms and to sing in tune before she was two years old. They should have been gifts for a long and happy life in music, as her mother and her teachers expected it to be. But Jackie told me that her perfect pitch was a seriously mixed blessing when she found herself playing with people who did not have the same gift.

She caught the public imagination when she was still in her teens. This happened not only because she was one of the finest performing musicians that Britain has ever produced, but also because she had an artistic power of communication that is given only to a few of the greatest –a quality that meant she touched people in the way that Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso and Lotte Lehmann did. As Risë Stevens so tellingly said of Lehmann, her voice had a ‘heart-tugging’ quality. Jackie had a heart-tugging cello voice.

She was thought of as a golden girl and, because of her inner radiance, was considered to be more beautiful than in fact she was. So far so good. It is one of the happy stories of art reaching beyond the usual boundaries, and so she passed into legend.

But the world has an irresistible urge to embellish its legends. It is a sad fact that ever since Jackie stopped playing, some of the media have kept certain aspects of a false image alive. The reasons are not far to seek: they include her luminous talent when she was still so very young and her ability to project the melancholy in the Elgar Cello Concerto as no one else has ever quite succeeded in doing, plus her terrifying illness – the slow destruction of one of the most gifted and loved of human beings. (To think of these things and of Jackie having to sleep on her back for more than nine years is to tread close to the brink of hell.)

Her close friends and several leading musicians, including some of the most famous names, were deeply offended by what appeared in the press around the time of the release of Anand Tucker’s film Hilary and Jackie in 1998, and they wrote a joint letter to The Times to say so; but we learnt that with a towering icon like Jackie, reacting serves only to extend the polemic. We realised that it is better to stay silent and make films that are true to her, better to remember that two of her distinguishing characteristics were her honesty and her wonderment in response to art, nature and the sound of the cello. I only once succeeded in getting her to say anything about these things, ‘It was always a source of wonder that when I put the bow on to the string it made a beautiful sound’ –a Jackie sentence, if ever there was one. Her recognisable sense of wonder reached the hearts of millions and continues to do so today, more than 30 years after she left us, which is very, very rare.

Most performing musicians disappear from view dramatically quickly when they leave the stage. Jackie is among those whose public following continues to grow to this day – yet another gift from the gods and evidence of Jackie’s blessed nature.

I saw no virtue in commiserating when I had the possibility of smiling with her, and I had good reason for smiling with her, for her laugh could be elemental. I guess that her devoted nurse-companion Ruthann Cannings saw some unhappy faces, but Jackie never showed any to me and I did everything I could to keep the so-generous smiles buoyant. I spent many hours listening to music with her and she retained both her enthusiasm and her critical faculties. She could say, without inhibition, that she mostly preferred her own recordings – she was not alone in that.

MAIN IMAGE ALLEGRO FILMS. CIRCLE IMAGE REG WILSON

Du Pré made nine productions with Nupen

CLIVE BARDA/ARENAPAL

JACKIE COULD SAY, WITHOUT INHIBITION, THAT SHE MOSTLY PREFERRED HER OWN R ECOR DINGS – SHE WAS NOT ALONE IN THAT

I also pushed her to many supper places in her wheelchair, without incident, although some of the other pushers were not so lucky. One of our happiest supper places was the Quickswood house in Primrose Hill where my first wife Diana and I were living. Jackie and Diana were very close and they loved cooking together, but we did not go to the house very often because its seven interposing steps were decidedly not wheelchair-friendly. Jackie also borrowed a cello for Diana and began to teach her to play it; they gleaned moments of real happiness from their closeness.

Then, suddenly, we moved house and there were no more stairs. To celebrate this event, plus Jackie’s birthday (in January 1972), I bought a round, rosewood tabletop, plonked it on the living room table and asked her who she would like to invite for supper. She suggested David Attenborough, Edward Fox, Charles Beare (who looked after her cellos), Louis Courts (her lawyer) and Elizabeth Wilson (who later wrote a book about Jackie), and they all came with their partners.

We had a happy time that evening, and agreed to make a new film to raise money for the Jacqueline du Pré concert hall, which was to be built at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. We ended up doing that much more successfully than we thought possible. We called the film Remembering Jacqueline du Pré (released in 1995, several years after her death). At our supper, Jackie lamented her inability to write or sign anything for St Hilda’s. Diana produced a sheet of paper, Jackie made a squiggle on it and Charles added, ‘Jacqueline du Pré, her mark’. Jackie loved to be involved.

It is the job of films, radio, television and the press to keep Jackie’s spirit alive in the world, and they are doing well with this so far. Way back in the beginning, Huw Wheldon, for me the best man on the production side that the BBC has ever had, said to me, ‘Nupen, you have found yourself a star. Use her. Your less courageous colleagues will warn you of the dangers of overuse. Heed them not. You will find that the dangers of overuse come a long way further down the line than your less courageous colleagues fear.’ He was right, thank the heavens: he often saw further than the rest of us. We made nine productions with Jackie before multiple sclerosis overtook us.

Huge surprise followed the television broadcast of our first film together, Jacqueline (1967), featuring a complete performance of the Elgar Concerto with Daniel Barenboim (whom she had recently married). We had shot the Elgar differently from the way that music was shot in those days, and that had an impact on the public response. As a result, EMI twice ran out of stock of the 1965 Barbirolli Elgar recording. This was totally unexpected and they had to reprint shellac discs in a hurry.

The next significant event also happened around this time: Jackie and her husband’s first encounter with violinist Pinchas Zukerman in New York. They were so impressed that they invited him to visit them in London, and very soon there was a new trio in the world. Unusually, Jackie could find no adequate words to describe the beauty of Pinchas’s playing. All she could say was, ‘Kitty, just wait till you hear him’ (Kitty was her nickname for me).

The opportunity for me to hear Pinchas with Jackie came soon after, at Oxford Town Hall, playing Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio. As always with music, Jackie was right: I had never heard two stringed instruments resonate together in quite that way.

It was the deepest musical experience I had had up to that time. There was another unexpected, spontaneous confirmation of the power of the ‘Ghost’. In 1970 I filmed their performance of the work at St John’s Smith Square, London. At the end of a public screening at the Louvre in Paris, a woman with a most impressive voice (perhaps an opera singer?) stood up and announced, loud and cle ar for all to hear, ‘Remarquable, c’était remarquable!’ It was a great moment.

Du Pré put some of her thoughts about Pinchas Zukerman’s playing in a letter to Nupen – written 46 years ago, after she had seen his portrait film about the violinist, Here to Make Music

I have no doubt that to making nine productions with Jackie taught me something that added a visual as a gift quality to all my subsequent productions. That is highly unusual for specific reasons: the first two, of accompanying the lett er in figure course, are her supernatural talent and her unforgettable charisma; but the thing that made the biggest difference to her relationship with the world around her and the ever-growing public that remembers her so lovingly was the invention of the first silent, or nearly silent, 16mm film cameras. We took cameras to places with Jackie and persuaded her to do things that had not been done in music films before. She created a different atmosphere, a different world. Jackie’s pizzicato on the train won the hearts of a new audience in many parts of the world – the camera loved her.

Here are the words that she herself chose to use 46 years ago about Zukerman and the portrait film we had just made with him (Pinchas Zukerman: Here to Make Music, 1975) in a letter she wrote to me when her handwriting was still as solid as an oak tree:

The stone that du Pré sent to Nupen as a gift accompanying the letter above

Nupen and du Pré in around 1968

LETTER AND STONE IMAGES CHRISTOPHER NUPEN. DU PRÉ IMAGE ALLEGRO FILMS

Dearest Friend,

When I saw your film of Pinky the other day, his playing – golden playing, sound and cherished character made that hour one to be held in one’s head for always. However, what I want to tell you is, that to me the film is YOU. That you are the house which holds those qualities and keeps them shining and gleaming within it, and afterwards invites one to love what is in it. Hence the present, with the just described message within it, and why it is what it is. All this is a bit inarticulate, but I hope you can understand a bit from it.

It comes with much love, from Smiley

In 2017, a cello category was added to Belgium’s long-standing Queen Elisabeth Competition and Belgian television carried out a nationwide survey to find the three best cellists in history. The results:

First – Rostropovich

Second – du Pré

Third – Casals

That could not have happened 34 years ago because Jackie had not been here for long enough; also because the public is slow to open its heart to that supreme level and Jackie was seemingly so forever young. But it has happened now and it has much to do with the way in which her magic has continued to radiate from the repeated showings of our films on television, which have kept her unforgettable persona artistica alive in the world, making her seemingly forever present, in her physical absence.

Following Jackie with developing camera equipment was a blessing, as regularly hearing some of the greatest music played by the most gifted performers is, at its best, the highest expression of the human mind. Thank you, Smiley.

I close with Neville Cardus, who concluded his review of Jackie’s debut performance of the Elgar in London on 21 March 1962 with: ‘Those actually present were witness, on the first day of spring, to an early blossoming in Miss du Pré’s playing, and such a beautiful blossoming as this year, or any other year, is likely to know for a long time to come.’

JACKIE THROUGH HER FRIENDS’ EYES

ALLEGRO FILMS

We made the first full-length Jackie film in 1967 (which was subsequently remade in 1982 and became an Allegro film entitled Jacqueline du Pré and the Elgar Cello Concerto) and afterwards the whole Elgar crew came to thank me for inviting them to be part of something that had been quite unmistakably special. That does not happen very often, and it made me start to feel the need to share extraordinary experiences such as these with as many people as possible through television. Some of those who agreed to join me in this endeavour shared memories of Jackie, and here are transcriptions of some of their words.

HUGH MAGUIRE

VIOLINIST (LEADER OF BBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA)

The first time that I saw Jackie was in the BBC studios in Maida Vale, and this gorgeous blonde – not an elegant creature in any way –a very loose-limbed young lady, came into the studio. You remember the Maida Vale London studio? She had a long walk, with her cello held aloft and a rapturous smile on her face, although she hadn’t met the BBC Symphony Orchestra before. One is a little suspicious of these very famous people, so I waited until I heard the first note and of course, you know that piece starts with the cello alone, and I was riveted by her, absolutely knocked out, instantly. But not only me. The whole orchestra was silenced. They were silenced by Elgar anyway to start with, but they were totally under her spell, immediately. Now that’s a strange thing for a lady sitting with her back to the audience. Just the beauty of the sound. The immense intensity and the physical presence was very, very powerful.

There is no question about it: whether she was in the company of Zukerman or Perlman or Barenboim, she was the star – she was the font of the inspiration. I am absolutely certain of it. She was also wonderful with my pals in the orchestra who did not get much opportunity to play chamber music. She would play anything with anybody and leave them with red, breathless excitement. I can say that for me she is a central figure, and more and more people are saying that.

JOHN BARBIROLLI

CONDUCTOR

She is sometimes accused of excessive emotions, but I love it. When you are young, you should have an excess of everything. If you haven’t an excess when you’re young, what are you going to pare off as the years go by?

CHARLES BEARE

VIOLIN EXPERT AND DEALER

She had an extraordinary way of producing tone on the cello. I’ve actually never heard anything like the variety of sound. Sometimes she would play the same note for two or three minutes, and one lost all sense of time as she got more into that note, with more expression than some people get into the performance of a concerto: with vibrato, without vibrato, with all the various bow pressures, with this, with that – she made music out of one note.

ELIZABETH WILSON

BIOGRAPHER

She doubted herself and, having written a book and talked to a lot of people, I came to realise that these doubts were something that accompanied her throughout her life and, although she appeared to be so sure, particularly with the cello on the platform, she had doubts about whether she was good enough and whether she was able to do this. And if she thought about it, she thought she couldn’t. It was a bit like that in life too. She would never have claimed that she could do something difficult, although she just got on and did it.

PINCHAS ZUKERMAN

VIOLINIST

In some ways, I think Jackie was probably the greatest human being I ever met: without any pretence, she was simple, she was honest, she was loving, she was kind, she was carefree, she smiled. We all knew her as Smiley, as that was her nickname. I think that when it comes to the playing it’s called genius; that’s the right word for it.