At four, Jacqueline du Pré heard a cello on the radio and wanted one
A small girl in Oxford heard a cello on the radio, asked her mother for one of those, and began lessons with homemade illustrated pieces. By 20 she had recorded an Elgar concerto that has never left the catalogue. Multiple sclerosis ended her performing career before 30, and she died at 42.
Jacqueline du Pré was born on 26 January 1945, the second child of Derek, a Jersey-born accountant turned magazine editor, and Iris, a pianist trained at the Royal Academy of Music. She entered the London Violoncello School at five. At 11 she won the Suggia Award, renewed annually until 1961, which paid for study at the Guildhall with William Pleeth, the teacher she always considered her main one. Her schooling ended at Queen's College in 1959, when she fell behind, and she never sat the GCE.
Prizes piled up. In 1960 came the Guildhall Gold Medal, a Casals masterclass in Zermatt and the Queen's Prize, awarded unanimously by a panel led by Yehudi Menuhin, who then invited her to play trios with him. She made her formal debut at Wigmore Hall in March 1961 aged 16, and her concerto debut playing Elgar at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 March 1962. That concerto became her signature: she returned to the Proms every year until 1969.
In 1965 she recorded it for EMI with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli, and played it for her American debut at Carnegie Hall on 14 May. Rostropovich, her teacher in Russia the following year, called her the only young cellist who could equal and overtake his own achievement. She married the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim in 1967 and played with orchestras from Cleveland to the Berlin Philharmonic.
Her godmother, Isména Holland, gave her two Stradivarius cellos, one made in 1673 and the Davidov of 1712, on which she recorded the famous Elgar. Near the end of her playing years she switched to a modern cello by the Philadelphia maker Sergio Peresson, using it until 1973. After illness forced her off the stage, she kept teaching until her death on 19 October 1987.
Source: Jacqueline du Pré
