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Du Pre's early years seemed charmed. As a teenager, she studied briefly with Pablo Casals and dazzled concertgoers. A patron gave her two Stradivarius cellos, the first when she was just 16. With it, she championed such British works as Edward Elgar's melancholy Cello Concerto, which became her signature piece. By the time Du Pre and Barenboim met and fell in love, she was moving in a circle of musical celebrities that included Arthur Rubinstein and Itzhak Perlman.
The relentless touring life of an elite musician, however, took an emotional and physical toll. And then there was the multiple sclerosis. Hints of her affliction started with sporadic numbness and dizzy spells. At first doctors ascribed them to psychological troubles. Finally came the diagnosis of MS. As the condition ravaged her body and robbed her of the ability to play, it brought on profound personality imbalances that created tremendous friction in her family.
Far from a kiss-and-tell shocker, Hilary and Jackie tenderly portrays Du Pre as a high-spirited sister who adored her siblings, starting letters to them with the teasing salutation "Dear Fart Face." While often melodramatic, the book explains the family's strong affection for and complex relationship with its most talented member. Says Hilary: "We all ran to keep up with her." Hilary also tactfully discusses why she believed that encouraging Jacqueline's affair with her husband would help her sister get over a difficult period in which she was briefly separated from Barenboim.
The Du Pres say they also wrote the book to exonerate their mother, who has been criticized for the way she relentlessly spurred Jacqueline's career. "It was frequently said that the MS was a result of Jackie being pushed by mother," says Hilary of the unfounded claim. Finally, to refute charges that they abandoned Jacqueline at the end of her life, the siblings painstakingly illuminate the difficulties of dealing with a relative who became increasingly belligerent as her health declined. The memoir, Hilary insists, was meant to be not a full biography but a family history. "When I wrote the book, I imagined that Jackie was standing beside me...collaborating with me," she says.
Wilson's biography, by contrast, offers a straightforward, scholarly account of the cellist's life. Barenboim not only urged Wilson, a family friend, to write the book but also shared his papers with her and even read her manuscript before it was published. Drawing on scores of interviews with people who knew Du Pre, Wilson tracks her career and scrupulously reconstructs all her performances. But the author doesn't completely shy away from salacious matters. She mentions the affair and notes that Du Pre also felt abandoned by Barenboim, who cared for her when she was ill but, during the same time, also set up house and fathered two children with another woman. This material, though, is dispensed with quickly. Du Pre, Wilson says, "would have been appalled" by the more intimate approach of her family's book.
One thing the Du Pres and Wilson agree on is that reviving Du Pre's memory will help popularize her again. And in the end, it is Du Pre's music that will be her true legacy.
--Reported by Barry Hillenbrand/London