Jacqueline du Pré: A Biography [Paperback]

Carol Easton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2000

Carol Easton, who knew Jacqueline du Pré well, draws on this friendship to create a moving and insightful portrait of a singularly complex person. Jacqueline du Pré (the subject of the recent film Hilary and Jackie) was the music world's "golden girl," with what appeared to many to be a fairytale career and storybook marriage to Daniel Barenboim. But away from her cello, du Pré was achingly human. As a child, she was isolated by her phenomenal talent. As an adult, she was confined to the rarefied, insular concert world. And during the last fifteen years of her life, she lived in the inexorably shrinking world of the invalid, as multiple sclerosis took its toll. The Baltimore Sun said, Carol Easton tells this extraordinary story "with feeling befitting du Pré's own."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A splendid evocation of the strange world of the prodigy, and a moving account of how the cello was both angel and monster--a source of painful isolation as well as unmatched passion." -- Chicago Sun-Times

"[A] strong, compelling, and compassionate book." -- Boston Globe

About the Author

Carol Easton has written acclaimed biographies of Agnes de Mille, Stan Kenton, and Sam Goldwyn. She lives in California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306809761
• ISBN-13: 978-0306809767
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,222,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Different View, June 29, 2006

By 

Robert Derenthal "bucherwurm" (California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jacqueline du Pré: A Biography (Paperback)

I read this biography of Jaqueline du Pre when it first came out in 1990. The author portrays her as a wonderful, talented cello player whose career is tragically ended by debilitating disease. This very positive portrait of Jaqueline has you falling in love with her, and then terribly saddened by her fate.

Then came Hilary and Jackie, the movie, which portray her as a neurotic jerk who seems perpetually depressed, and tired of her cello. In the Easton biography Ms. du Pre's husband is the philandering one, and no mention is made of a tryst between Jackie and Hilary's husband.

I don't know. Maybe this book is pure hagiography, i.e. the author is enamored of JdP, and ignores anything negative. Yet is interesting to have a view of this renowned cellist that is different than the movie. I really enjoyed reading the book, and as a lover of Ms. Du Pre's music, maybe this positive image is the one I want to stick in my mind.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is not only about music, a world-class classical performer and a tragedy, it is about MS, February 24, 2009

By 

M. Bucci (Boston area) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jacqueline du Pré: A Biography (Paperback)

I have just finished the du Pré biography and what insights I've gained, not only about music, performance, concert and recording life in the 60s, and the cello, but also from reading about her mother, her family background, her isolated childhood, her alleged revolt against her parents by converting to Judaism ...and about multiple sclerosis. Carol Easton's book is about music, yes, but mostly about du Pré!

How domineering was her mother who regularly visited her after she was diagnosed but later become aloof and distant; and how Jackie fell into surrounding herself with mother images and domination-substitutes earlier: Barenboim (Type-A personality with unbounded energy), "The Schubert 'Trout' Quintet" (jet-set superstars), along with the grueling and dictatorial pressures of concert and recording schedules. MS stopped all of it! She found a sympathetic confidant in her therapist who suddenly and prematurely died at age 50, then a kinship with another Freudian analyst.

Just a few years into her marriage, and at her height, she wished nothing more than to lead a normal life and raise a family, but she had little skills in it and no background to draw from having grown-up sheltered to focus on a concentrated life with the cello - nor could she remove herself from the plateau she and Daniel now occupied together. In an indirect way, she pleased her mother's ambition for her if only because she could please herself in the music - not because she was promotional of her prodigious talent, but because she was profoundly in love with music. If she lost herself and became "someone else" when playing the cello, as one friend said, maybe it was because she truly became herself when playing. After she could no longer play and the disease overcame her body, her mother practically disappeared - for all practical purposes - from her life, "as though they were perfect strangers". Her husband and mother-in-law, Aida, did not abandon her, but Daniel continued his career away in Paris nevertheless, and in later years the relationship grew more distant to one that became for the music world, "an open secret" - Barenboim's other life with pianist Helena Bachkirev.

She was known as "Smiley" to the Barenboim gang, but privately knew herself to be complex, deeply sensitive, soul-searching and vulnerable, traits her shyness never revealed. To others, she could pass for a simple, wholesome farm girl who enjoyed practical jokes and children. The cello became her soulmate in a sense, then Barenboim entered and the two were swept into total love and produced total music - the Camelot couple of music, as TIME wrote at the time. But MS began earlier than is publicly discussed, and after diagnosis and officially abandoning a concert life, her brief career and twelve years of recordings were not forgotten, only she, the invalid, was forgotten by the public. She could no longer see with blurred vision but heard the passers-by, "Isn't that Jacqueline du Pré? I thought she was dead!"

Privately, and with intimates, du Pré continued to conduct life from her wheelchair. She taught cello instead of played it. She used words instead of notes to express herself. By 1980, she required a live-in nurse but was shattered, shackled and repressed by her husband's choice of Ruth Ann, a puritanical evangelical Christian who viewed Jackie's illness as a wrathful judgement from God. Frequent discreet admissions by family and friends - even by the wife of Rostropovich - that Jackie's MS was punishment by God for converting to Judaism were unbearable to hear. Ruth Ann echoed this sentiment too often. "Wonderful!' exclaimed Jackie's GP. "For two thousand years medical science has tried to find the cause of multiple sclerosis, and Ruth Ann has discovered it for us!"

Jacqueline did not die from MS, no one does. She died of pneumonia. In her last month, October 1987, she requested each visitor to play her own recording of Kol Nidrei, written for the Day of Atonement. In her last hour, she was comatose and surrounded by family and friends. Anthony Pleeth, knowing that comatose patients often retain their sense of hearing, played Jackie's recording of the Schumann Cello Concerto on the phonograph, as William Pleeth, her "cello dad", held her hand.

She was buried at Golders Green's Jewish Cemetery.


This book is not only about music, a world-class classical performer and a tragedy, it is about MS. If you have MS or know someone with MS, this book is valuable. I have MS. I identify with Jackie's symptoms up to the point of her illness becoming "primary-progressive", though I am secondary-progressive and may enter into her later stages sooner rather than later. I am not shocked to read about her difficulties and confusions and emotional swings and all the misunderstandings and false judgements accorded her. This was the territory of MS in the seventies and remains so today! Before diagnosis, she, like others, underwent terrible emotional swings and psychological traumas without a guidebook or map, without a medical "hook" that would excuse her and explain the disease befalling her to her baffled admirers. Yet, every MS person experiences these to some degree, and the world doesn't take notice and understand - or so it seems.

Although this biography was written in 1989, the basics about MS, clinical research into its cause, and a description of Jackie's symptoms experienced at various stages of the disease have not changed. Nor has society changed in its limited understanding and awareness of this chronic and devastating illness. Nor has religious fanaticism and bigotry ceased. Nor has a cure for MS been found. Most importantly, an MS person (family member, partner or caregiver) can find "closure" in her story, if not cry in silence - but know they are not alone! I believe Jackie would have liked the world to know as much about MS as they do about Elgar. Carol Easton's book fulfills part of that wish.