Thursday Book: Forget the child of nature

JACQUELINE DU PRe; BY ELIZABETH WILSON WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, pounds

JACQUELINE DU Pre's brother and sister published an "intimate memoir" of their cellist sister last year. It was a warm, familial book that offered, between bowls of healing soup and croissants accompanied by steaming coffee, vicious helpings of posthumous honesty. The sister revealed that her husband had had a sexual relationship with the cellist. The only way to make Jackie happy, didn't we know, "was to give her what she wanted". The film of the book has already been made.

A Genius in the Family hoped to poke the icon in the eye, but ended up adding polish to the myth. It was another portrait of Jackie as original English hurricane.

When Jackie's husband, Daniel Barenboim, played word games with Jackie and her sister, he "approached the game logically". Jackie and Hilary "relied on their instincts", with the result that the "simple sisters" nearly always "jumped to the answers first, leaving the men's careful calculations far behind".

In the Scrabble for truth, if you believe the du Pre myth, intuitive force of nature beats cold ratiocination hands down.

Elizabeth Wilson has now written the best biography of du Pre available. That she was authorised by Daniel Barenboim and cold-shouldered by the family is some gain and little loss. There are no family letters beginning "Dear Fart Face", or youthful ones written on lavatory paper and signed "PS: Unused!" The affair with the brother-in-law lasts not a chapter, but a decent couple of pages. Barenboim's relationship with another woman in Paris, while his wife was dying in London, is noted; its complicated ethics are considered, but the episode is not pruriently dwelt on.

Can we rely on our serious, dogged, unsensational biographer - there's not an adolescent village-hall performance undocumented - to knock the child-of-nature stuff on the head? Wilson knew du Pre well, studied cello under Rostropovich with her in Moscow, and writes with insight of the technical tasks facing the cellist. But disappointment sets in with the first windswept anecdote on page 24. The cello came first, we are reassured. But Jackie's attachment to the natural world was "almost primordial". Her love of the elements was "lifelong". She inherited "a strong feeling for nature and a great love of the sea".

There are dissenting voices. Stanley Sadie reckoned her Haydn Concerto "not a serious interpretation at all". Sir John Barbirolli noted how du Pre's mannerisms, at the age of 16, were "distracting and frankly rather unpleasant". But it was Barbirolli, a cellist himself, who conducted the Elgar recording four years later.

No one seriously questions du Pre's innate musical abilities. No one who has heard her Elgar Concerto or her Beethoven trios with Barenboim and Zukerman doubts that she found the notes, played the phrases and caught the musical sense of paragraph with astonishing ease.

But the nature of musical ability, and the composition of a performer's subsequent reputation, are not truly investigated. The composer Alexander Goehr's comment about how her public "bought" du Pre as a "commodity" is creditably reproduced, but passed over in silence.

Wilson is hard on critics when it serves her; soft on them ditto. The fragrant comments of the man from the Daily Mail, who wrote that "it was affecting that this late Elgar work, with its hints of autumn, should be presented to us by a girl in springtime" surely deserved some judicial censure. And the book has too many quotes from critics.

Aesthetic judgements feed off each other; reputations are constructed, not acquired. Elizabeth Wilson knows this. One American critic's jibe that du Pre's vibrato was "as wide as the English Channel" served, she suggests, as a "template" for future discussions of the cellist's 1967 American tour - and thus, presumably, vitiated its conclusions. If a similar scepticism had been extended to the received story of du Pre - the whizzing daughter of the whirlwind - this might have been an exemplary biography.

Complex questions about what the performer did when she made music from inky notes, about the status of the musical text, are touched on but not systematically applied.

There are hints of how the book might have subjected the myth to the scrutiny it deserves. Barenboim comments that his wife was "totally unintellectual" but had "an instinct for intellectual and rational thoughts". Pierre Boulez remarks on the paradox of du Pre's intuition, which had "its own logic".

But the cellist's sad end, as a victim of multiple sclerosis, emerges as the opportunity for a final push at the meteorological metaphor. Her death came the day after the great storm of 1987. Her suffering had itself caused "tempestuous havoc" in her own life and the lives of those close to her. But we can be thankful that she deployed her talents as she did: "with the positive energy of sunshine".

Dermot Clinch