Friday, March 28, 2025 at 8 p.m. on KPBS 2 / Stream now with KPBS Passport!
Those who know, consider Jacqueline du Pré one of the greatest cellists of all time – certainly in the top three - despite a career that was cruelly curtailed by multiple sclerosis when she was just twenty-eight years old. The force of nature took away her prodigious gift and her love of performing and she endured fourteen years of unremitting illness.
However, during her short time on the international concert platform she had the musical world at her feet, with an expressive style that cast a spell on anyone who saw her perform.
"Jacqueline Du Pré: Genius and Tragedy," tells the story of who she was and why she was such an extraordinary musician. It is full of candid moments off-stage and in rehearsal, together with powerful concert performances. It is Introduced and narrated by grammy-winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who acquired du Pré’s famous cello, the Davidov Stradivarius, made in 1712. He says, “Whenever I play it, I feel the privilege of being tangibly and tactilely connected to her, to her cello sound and to her soul.”
On March 21, 1962, Jacqueline du Pré gave her first performance of the Elgar cello concerto at the Royal Festival Hall in London. It was a performance that launched her onto the world stage at 17 years old.
Neville Cardus, one of England’s most distinguished writers on music, described the occasion with these words: “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.”
Published in 1919 after the First World War, and full of anguish, it is Elgar’s final work and one of the world’s great cello concertos. It became du Pré’s signature piece and the benchmark against which all other renditions would be measured; its lamenting melody, inescapably resonating with her own tragic story.
In swinging 1960s London, the Beatles were topping the pop charts, but Jacqueline du Pré was the poster child for a new golden generation of artists and friends, who injected a youthful excitement into an industry steeped in tradition – a classical ‘rat pack’ that included Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta and her husband, Daniel Barenboim.
As a glamourous and musically charged couple, Barenboim and du Pré were like a modern version of Clara and Robert Schumann: together, they devoured the cello and piano repertoire and the recordings they made continue to delight audiences across the globe.
Du Pré was a blithe spirit, known to her friends as ‘Smiley’ but, on stage with her cello, she possessed an intensity that communicated the most profound feelings rooted in the depths of great music.
Our interviews provide an incomparable insight from those who knew du Pré best, including RuthAnn Cannings, who cared for her throughout her illness.
Described as, “beyond words,” du Pré’s innate abilities confounded even her fellow musicians, who struggled to rationalize how music flowed so naturally from her. She studied under the greats – Casals, Tortelier, and Rostropovich – but it is sequences with her teacher William Pleeth, her “cello daddy,” that provide some of our most intimate and engaging footage. The affection for Jacqueline du Pré and the wonder at her playing remains undiminished, nearly forty years after her death in 1987.
