Siblings in cahoots
Norman Lebrecht
A GENIUS IN THE FAMILY: AN INTIMATE MEMOIR OF JACQUELINE DU PRE by Hilary du Pre and Piers du Pre Chatto, £16.99, pp. 426 There have been good music biogra- phies that were written for bad reasons and bad ones for good. I have read books by divas about their dogs, and some by dogs about divas. I have reviewed every kind of ghosting and boasting, and even enjoyed the wickedly plagiarised lives of Haydn and Mozart by 'L. A. C. Bombet', also known as Stendhal.
Yet, in a sweeping and none too fastidious search for musical facts, I don't think I have ever opened a tackier or more disingenuous book than this 'intimate memoir' of the cellist Jacqueline du Pre by her elder sister and younger brother, Hilary and Piers.
The slippery stuff starts on the flyleaf: This book is not a biography nor an account of Jackie's career,' we are warned. It is simply what happened. We offer the reader the story of our family, from within.' So why, 400 pages later, is acknowledg- ment offered to around 100 individuals, mostly from the music world, who gave Interviews and hospitality' to the authors? There is even a word of thanks to Daniel Barenboim — Jacqueline's widower — and a 'heartfelt' whole-page tribute to Jan Younghusband, 'without whose tireless guidance this book could not have been written'. Miss Younghusband, I gather, assisted with the interviews and writing. So much for the family, from within. Barenboim is meanwhile collaborating With the cellist Elizabeth Wilson on an authoritative musical study of his late wife. Willson proposed pooling resources with the du Pres in a single consensual biogra- phy, but was rebuffed. There is unlikely to be much common ground. Barenboim refers to his wife as `Jacqueline'; her siblings call her Jackie, Jacks and several sillier diminutives.
,,,Their story is told mostly in the voice of 'Wary, born in April 1942, three years ahead of Jacqueline. They chatter away in girl-talk throughout the book, to the point where you wonder whether either of them ever grew up, or how, after 40 years, Hilary maintains such perfect recall of breakfast- table banalities:
`Come on, darling, eat up. We need to get going or we'll all be late.' Hil and Piers can go, but I'm staying at home today.' Not today, Jackables, it's a school day.' `I'm not going.' `Come on, darling, you'll be fine once you're there.. .'
Hold the sick-bag, you may have greater need of it. Here is Piers, on hearing that his brilliant sister is smitten with Barenboim:
At one stage I went into the kitchen to refill the coffee-jug. Jackie followed me.
'I love him, Bar.'
`Really?' I said. 'I would never have guessed.' She blew a wet raspberry at me. 'And hurry up with the coffee, shitface.'
There is little in the early chapters that explains the eruption of a unique talent, beyond a sense of her mother's driving ambition and the simmering resentment of siblings who felt their own musical gifts were parentally neglected. Jacqueline her- self never doubted her singularity. She told her first long-term boyfriend, the pianist Stephen Kovacevich, 'I have this God- given gift and have the pleasure and the privilege to share it with my friends.' The effulgence of her playing and her personality must have escaped her sister and brother. What they appear to have seen was either a cuckoo in the nest 'she just took what she wanted,' said Hilary — or a passport to prosperity. Piers recalls Jackie opening a suitcase full of banknotes and flinging them joyously in the air.
When she fell for the pianist and conduc- tor Daniel Barenboim in March 1967 and married him in Israel after the Six-Day war, the family was flummoxed. The first time she brought Barenboim home, her mother cooked pork. He took no offence; but Hilary drops casual asides about a `Jewish musical mafia' and there are indications that the family was less than enamoured with Jacqueline's mature and considered decision to convert to Judaism. She was 'an English country girl, gauche and unworldly,' witters Hilary, while Daniel was a 'socialite', much travelled and 'enjoying good living': a rootless cosmopolitan, as Uncle Joe would have put it.
The selling point of this book, which earned it Murdoch serialisation, telly advertising and feature-film treatment, is Hilary's revelation that she shared her husband sexually with her sister. Greater love hath no sibling . . . The facts of the matter are that in 1971, alarmed by physical symptoms that left her scared and Barenboim bewildered, Jacqueline du Pré took refuge on Hilary's farm and had a brief fling with her brother-in-law, Christo- pher `Kiffer' Finzi, son of the pastoral English composer, Gerald Finzi.
She was plainly suffering some kind of mental breakdown, and within weeks was reunited with Barenboim. If Hilary is to be believed, her sacrifice saved her sister's sanity and her husband was the only man who could tame her. Jacqueline, however, told friends that it was 'no big deal', one of those flings that just happened in the early days of sexual liberation. Hilary herself has significantly refused to deny that she shared her husband with other women. Two years later, when she was 28, Jacqueline's life was destroyed by multiple sclerosis. While Barenboim afforded her every care and comfort until her death in 1987, her family drifted away. 'They did not come often and there was no consis- tency to their visits,' her nurse, Ruth Ann Cannings, has told me. The account given by Hilary and Piers of Jacqueline's last years is disputed by at least a dozen indi- viduals who saw her daily or weekly. The tragedy they describe is theirs, not hers. The only reason for writing such a book is one that might be recognised by Andrew Morton. It cannot be dismissed lightly, because a film version with Channel 4 finance — bad decision, Michael Jackson — will soon invade our living-rooms, dis- figuring the golden memory of one of the last exuberances to explode onto the world's concert platforms. If you were thinking of buying the book, please don't. Give the £16.99 to the Jacqueline du Pre Appeal at the Musicians' Benevolent Fund, where it might do some good.
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