Jacqueline du Pré

by Wilson, Elizabeth

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 Pre in her playing days, charts du Pre's meteoric career from her early identification with the sound of 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 Pre 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. The author details Jack