Jacqueline du Pre: Her Life, Her Music, Her Legend

She was beautiful. She was a musical genius. She was married to another prodigious musician, the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. Their fairy-tale marriage turned them into a royal musical couple. In this definitive biography, Elizabeth Wilson, herself a cellist who knew Jacqueline du Pr in her playing days, charts du Pr's meteoric career from her early identification with the cello to the achievement of her stardom by her early twenties, when she became a legend virtually overnight. For over a decade Jacqueline du Pr performed the cello repertory with all the best symphonic orchestras to standing-room-only houses around the world, and during those years she also recorded the entire cello literature. At the age of twenty-seven, however, Jackie was felled at the height of her career by multiple sclerosis. She died in 1987, leaving behind a rich and extraordinary musical legacy, and renowned as one of the best-loved musicians of the century. Jackie's unworldly nature and ability to communicate in her playing the full spectrum of human emotions hid a complex personality where dark doubts coexisted with the certainty of her talent. Wilson details Jackie's passionate, tumultuous, complicated relationship with her sister Hilary, depicted in the film Hilary and Jackie. She also examines the origins and nature of Jackie's extraordinary talent, assesses her lasting importance as an interpreter, and concludes her biography with a sensitive account of du Pr's tragic physical decline, when, no longer able to play, Jacqueline struggled bravely against the ravages of her unforgiving illness. Du Pr's glorious career, her valiant fight against hopeless odds, brings additional inspiration to this edifying biography.