Info:
Duration: 56’ 17”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 2001
Jacqueline du Pré caught the public imagination when she was still in her teens. That happened not only because she was one the finest performing musicians that Britain has ever produced - one of the very finest - but because she had a quality that is given only to a few of the greatest artists, a quality that touched people in the way that Maria Callas did, or Enrico Caruso or Lotte Lehmann or Sergei Rachmaninoff did.
She was thought of as a golden girl and, because of her inner radiance, was thought to be a great deal more beautiful than in fact she was. So far so good. It is one of the happy stories of art reaching beyond the usual boundaries and Jacqueline du Pré has become one of the very few performing artists of the twentieth century whose reputations rose steadily from the time of their deaths.
And so, she has passed into legend.
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The reasons are not far to seek. They include her luminous talent when she was so very young; her ability to capture the melancholy in the Elgar concerto, as no other cellist has ever quite succeeded in doing - and at a strangely early age; her seemingly romantic career, terminated so soon by illness, and the tragedy of her early death after 14 years of slowly encroaching paralysis.
In this process the true picture of the person has been clouded and every one of the people close to Jacqueline du Pré has been appalled at the false image which has been fed into the world.
We have received dozens of appeals to put the record straight. We are in what people consider to be a unique position to do that because of the films which we made with her while she was alive and well and because Christopher Nupen knew her intimately for 26 years.
There is a further reason. Neither we, nor anybody else, has ever made a film about what kind of person she was. When we made the earlier films Jacqueline du Pré was such an unmistakable presence in the world that we took the personality for granted and so those films concentrate on what kind of an artist she was. The difference between them and this new project is that this one is focussed specifically on her personality because it is the image of the person that has been distorted by the legends.
What this film aims to do is to present a true picture of the artist and the woman using footage of Jacqueline du Pré herself that has never been shown in public before while those who knew her best and worked most closely with her bear witness to what it was that made her so memorable a person.
The contributors include Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Toby Perlman, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, HRH The Duchess of Kent, Lady Evelyn Barbirolli, Charles Beare (who was one of her closest personal friends and who looked after all her 'cellos from the start of her career), Vladimir Ashkenazy, Hugh Maguire, Fou Ts’ong, her doctor Leonard Selby and her close friend and biographer, Elizabeth Wilson. All these people felt strongly that this film should be made, and their intimate knowledge of the subject gives a quality of conviction and enthusiasm to their personal recollections which projects a vivid picture of the real Jacqueline du Pré.
There is music in the film, all played by Jacqueline du Pré herself, and all shot by us in her vintage years. When this film released, none of it has ever been published before. In fact, this film consisted 100% of material that has not previously been shown.
Our Films on DVD
There cannot be too many films made of our great performers, provided they are produced with an honest intention and true to the subject. Why? Because film remembers the artistic persona as nothing else can do in quite the same way. This is particularly true in the case of Jacqueline du Pré where so many myths have been invented to explain the unexplainable.
Happily, DVD does not need to explain, it can show the artist just as she was and in a way that was never possible before the invention of the first silent 16mm cameras in the 1960s - just in time for her. First, we present Jacqueline du Pré as seen through the eyes, the ears and the words of the people who knew her best - Who was Jacqueline du Pré? - and second, to present her through her music - Remembering Jacqueline du Pré.
Between those two films the DVD contains a montage of images of Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim in action, taken from our archives and accompanied by an audio recording, made by us, of the first movement of the Brahms E minor cello sonata (Interlude with Johannes Brahms) and an interview with Jacqueline du Pré, shot in 1980, which has never been previously released on television, nor on home video.
This DVD contains a re-release of two of our most cherished Jacqueline du Pré films. The first is a portrait film which was epoch-making when it premiered; the second is a performance film which was described by the French opera and film director Jean-Pierre Ponelle as the most successful translation of musical performance onto the screen that he had ever seen. Both were pioneering films, made possible by the newly invented lightweight, silent 16mm film cameras.
We were lucky to be there in the right place, at the right time, and with the right relationship with Jacqueline du Pré to preserve something of her magic on film. There is an aura which radiates from the great performers and when it comes to remembering the artistic persona, the camera sees things which the other media do not see and it remembers them with an intimacy which nothing else can equal.
The titles of the two films are Jacqueline du Pré and the Elgar cello Concerto, which contains a complete filmed performance of the work with the new Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and The Ghost, which is a filmed performance of Beethoven's piano Trio Opus 70 No. 1 played by Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman and Jacqueline du Pré.
This DVD contains two of the most famous Schubert films — each entirely different from the other in style, content and spirit.
The first, The Trout, presents a youthful explosion of exuberant talent; starting with Schubert himself — who wrote his Trout Quintet when he was 22 years old. His lead is picked up and brought to life by five extravagantly gifted young musicians when they were barely older than Schubert had been when he wrote the piece. Their names: Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Jacqueline du Pré and Zubin Mehta.
The film was shot in a single week in August of 1969 and culminates with a performance of Schubert's Trout Quintet, filmed live on-stage at the new Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, in London.
The second film, The Greatest Love and the Greatest Sorrow, looks at Schubert's astonishing achievements in the last 20 months of his life - after the death of his god, Beethoven. He asked the question, "Who would dare to do anything after Beethoven”? The answer, of course, was Franz Peter Schubert, in the music which he wrote after Beethoven's death.
