Jacqueline du Pré
From left Jacqueline du Pré in a performance of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, Op. 47, Daniel Barenboim, Conductor; a second recording of the work for cello and piano, featuring Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich.
The number of choices one has for highlighting great women classical musicians seems endless, but I came across a particularly beautiful performance of a work which I would like to mention today, and in so doing also talk about the soloist, Jacqueline du Pré.
The Kol Nidrei by Max Bruch is a work written for cello in 1880. He composed it while serving as conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. It was completed in Liverpool and published the following year in Berlin. Bruch wrote the piece at the request of the German cellist Robert Hausmann, who premiered it, and later became associated with other major cello works of the era.
The work is significant by virtue of the fact that historically its associations are primarily Jewish, even though Bruch himself was a Protestant, albeit one who was deeply interested in folk traditions and religious melodies. This interest was further encouraged by his acquaintances in the Jewish community, chief among them Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein, who introduced him to the Kol Nidrei melody, which is a prayer that opens the evening service of Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, the holiest and most solemn day in Judaism.
Cellist Jacqueline du Pré was born in 1945 in Oxford, England. It is said that she first heard the sound of the cello on the radio at age four. After her mother told her what the instrument was she said she wanted one and began lessons the following year. Her primary teacher was British cellist William Pleeth at the Guildhall School of Music. She also received lessons from Pablo Casals, Paul Tortelier, and Mstislav Rostropovich, some of the greatest cellists of the century, the last of whom reportedly proclaimed her to be the only cellist who could equal or surpass him.
Many consider her pivotal recording the Cello Concerto in E-minor, Op. 85 by Edward Elgar, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of John Barbirolli, and some still maintain this is the one of the greatest classical music recordings ever made.
Around 1970, when she was just in her mid-twenties, du Pré began experiencing numbness in her fingers and a loss of coordination, which was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. This led to her giving her final concerts in 1973 at the age of twenty-eight.
Having married pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim in 1967, they would become one of classical music’s most celebrated couples. Their collaborations made them well-known for an intense immediacy of performance that seemed to carry with it a kind of dialogue between them.
I must say that I fell in love with the Kol Nidrei even after hearing it for the first time. There is an intense vocal-like line in du Pré’s interpretation that is almost like when a cantor sings in synagogue. This, paired with her strength and use of vibrato, feels like listening to someone pray.
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