Jacqueline du Pre by Elizabeth Wilson, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 466pp, 20 in UK
Haven't we just had one of these? Oh, no, sorry - what we had was a "kiss and tell" memoir in which Jacqueline du Pre's brother Piers and sister Hilary portrayed the famous cellist as, among other things, an unreconstituted monster and voracious man-eater. In her preface Elizabeth Wilson says she was asked to write a biography of du Pre soon after the latter's death from multiple sclerosis in October 1987. She refused, she says, on the grounds that she "did not yet feel up to the task and had as yet little experience of writing". Five years later she changed her mind, and this book is the result. But if Wilson's biography is at least partly an exercise in damage limitation, the impartial reader can't help but sympathise with the author, for she has a gargantuan task. Not only did the du Pres get into print first with last year's A Genius in the Family, but their intensely personal revelations created a huge splash in the quiet pond of classical music, and the ripples are still spreading merrily outwards; the soon-to-be-released feature film, Hilary and Jackie, will bring their vitriolic viewpoint to a mass audience. In any case, as Wilson confesses right away, it would take a genius to make a saint out of Jacqueline du Pre, rowdy, bawdy and bolshie as she was.
The musical legacy, however, offers a rich vein for exploration, and Wilson mines it wisely, going into great detail on the subject of du Pre's musical education, from early lessons with her mother to master classes with Tortelier and Rostropovich, devoting many pages to the circumstances surrounding the cellist's various recordings and rehearsing, as usual in biographies of classical musicians, all the major performances of du Pre's career and the critical reaction to them. This sort of thing can be as dull as ditchwater, but to Wilson's credit - and, ultimately, to that of her unruly subject - she makes a lively fist of it, with plenty of anecdotes and reminiscences from a plethora of famous names. Not all are favourable, but the overall impression is of a vigorous and generous, if occasionally over-the-top, musical personality. All of which is fair enough; but still, the latter chapters of the book, which deal with du Pre's decline, strike one or two jarring notes. Du Pre's mother Iris, who emerges from the early part of the story smelling of roses - a fine musician herself, she unhesitatingly bought her four-year-old daughter a full-sized cello and would write little pieces for her to play, slipping them under her pillow at night - attracts severe censure for her perceived lack of devotion during Jacqueline's illness, with Wilson suggesting at one point that Iris was simply annoyed at her investment's failure to pay off: "She had devoted a large part of her life to helping Jackie become a great musician; to see all she had invested in crumble before her eyes was bitter indeed."
This seems harsh, considering that du Pre's husband Daniel Barenboim is resented as a "tower of strength" throughout. Having lifted his wife's music-making to new levels when she was well, he was a comfort to her, we read, when she was not: "Every time Daniel came to the house or phoned, Jackie's eyes would light up and her voice would soften . . ." The same Daniel who, during the anguished months when du Pre was barely able to walk or hold a cello, blithely accepted the word of her doctors that her problems were psychosomatic and she should pull herself together; the same Daniel who, shortly after her eventual diagnosis with MS, accepted a full-time conducting post in Paris? A tower of strength can also be an impregnable fortress, of course.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist