Jacqueline du Pré: An everlasting legacy

Few know du Pré’s legacy as intimately as Paul Rah, a Korean-New Zealand cellist, writer, and former artist manager based in Munich, Germany. For over 30 years, he has been deeply engaged in studying and preserving her artistry, curating a unique collection of archival materials and working closely with those who knew her best. His expertise has led him to collaborate with institutions such as Warner Classics, The Strad, medici.tv, and Allegro Films, where he recently served as Archive Research Consultant for the documentary Jacqueline du Pré: Genius & Tragedy, created to honor this milestone anniversary.

In this article, Paul Rah shares his coups de cœur—his personal highlights from medici.tv’s extensive collection of Jacqueline du Pré’s performances and films. Through these selections, we revisit the magic of her playing and the impact of her groundbreaking presence on screen, ensuring that her artistry continues to enchant and move audiences today.

‘Jacqueline du Pré’ —Hers is now an almost mythical name in the realm of western classical music, in part due to her short but meteorically blazing performing career as well as her tragic life story. On what would have been the 80th anniversary of the beloved cellist’s birth in January 2025, we celebrate this most unique of musicians and her pioneering audiovisual legacy, and who continues to inspire and delight people all over the world today.

Prelude 

Jacqueline du Pré’s life and career have been recounted many times since her passing in 1987, but they remain captivating. Born in Oxford on 26 January 1945, her musical talent emerged early—she could sing in tune before speaking. At four, she fell in love with the cello after hearing it on BBC Radio and received her first instrument at five. She studied at the London Cello School and with William Pleeth, her most influential teacher. By 16, she had won multiple competitions, including the Suggia Award seven times.

Her Wigmore Hall début in 1961 marked the start of her rise to fame, and her 1962 performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra cemented her reputation. She honed her artistry with Pablo Casals, Paul Tortelier, and Mstislav Rostropovich, and throughout the 1960s, she performed with leading orchestras. A Proms regular, she played Elgar’s concerto every summer from 1962 to 1965, and her frequent BBC performances—many sadly lost—furthered her status as one of the greatest cellists of her generation.

At the same time, South African filmmaker Christopher Nupen (1934–2023) was revolutionizing classical music films at the BBC. He first heard du Pré in a 1962 broadcast and met her through guitarist John Williams, who had recorded with her for EMI. He was struck by her dual nature—radiant with her cello yet shy without it. Their collaboration would later help shape public fascination with her.

Recordings played a crucial role in du Pré’s legacy. One standout is her legendary EMI studio recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir John Barbirolli, which, despite being audio-only, cemented her status and captured the public’s imagination.

Jacqueline

In the summer of 1967, after several years of friendship with du Pré, Nupen was finally compelled to convince the BBC to make a film about the young cellist, called simply Jacqueline.

Filmed between August and September of that year, its format was rather unusual for its time and featured two parts; the first half a candid documentary – interviews featuring du Pré, her parents Derek and Iris, Sir John Barbirolli, William Pleeth and Daniel Barenboim- and a complete performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto with the New Philharmonia Orchestra under Barenboim in the second part, filmed at the BBC TV Studio in Woods Lane, London. For this first film he made of du Pré, Nupen successfully manages to capture on screen the direct and spontaneous creativity of her playing, as well as an unaffected, natural personality behind her cello. In the performance of the Elgar concerto, Nupen’s imaginative use of his cameras show the minutest details of her playing which would not always have been immediately obvious in the concert hall, for example in the fourth movement where the viewer can delight in seeing her total physical identification with the music; during the short cadenza before the main part of the fourth movement, the sudden fury in her eyes in the ascent to a high A still take the breath away almost 60 years on, or her visibly humorous glee on a G Major descending scale later on in the movement.

Near the end of the concerto, during the last moment of calm before the final storm of the coda in the last movement – which du Pré called ‘the tear-drop passage’ – her contained movements, coupled with a deep inner concentration really give the impression of time standing still, which only a visual document could fully capture. 

The film was first broadcast on 8 December 1967 on BBC One and was a critical and ratings success, and led many viewers to write in expressing their delight in seeing this artist at one with her music. 13 years later, in 1980, Nupen decided to update his ‘Jacqueline’ film with new commentary as well as additional footage of her at work editing her version of the Elgar concerto (with her friend and fellow cellist Moray Welsh), and retitled the film Jacqueline du Pré and the Elgar Cello Concerto. This subsequently became the final cut of Nupen’s first film with his friend ‘Smiley’ and is the version that can be viewed on medici.tv.

The Trout

The next film by Nupen to feature du Pré was The Trout in 1969, filmed in the same style as Jacqueline, this time in colour. Featuring often humour-filled and light-hearted rehearsal footage of du Pré and Barenboim alongside her friends Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Zubin Mehta (who were all well on their way to superstardom), the film concludes with a full performance of Schubert’s eponymous piano quintet, filmed on 30 August 1969 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London during the Southbank Festival in London, which at the time had recently been inaugurated by Barenboim. 

One could argue that Nupen’s use of the compact 16mm cameras was even more inspired here than in his first film with du Pré, as it shows the musicians very much up close and personal (all without invading their space), outside the confines of a studio and instead in an informal rehearsal room, as well as in personal situations (such as the opening of the film where Pinchas Zukerman nonchalantly tries out a viola in the then-Wardour Street atelier of Charles Beare – one of the world’s greatest stringed instrument dealers – Itzhak Perlman in the garden of his rented London flat with his family, or the shot of Zubin Mehta and his wife Nancy arriving at Heathrow Airport) and later backstage in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where minutes before the concert the five friends revel in completely unserious fun with their instruments, with hilarious results (the vision of Perlman playing Flight of the Bumblebee on du Pré’s cello remains an unforgettable sight!).

 But once the quintet enter the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the tone is set for music making of the highest order, the like of which was never to be repeated.

In 1980, du Pré recalled the happy occasion: “We were five friends, linked by our youth, and by the pleasure we had in making music together. And suddenly there was a statement of our happiness, forever[…] When I see ‘The Trout’, it gives me something of that feeling which will always be so precious to me.”

Barenboim on Beethoven

In preparation for the Beethoven bicentennial in 1970, Daniel Barenboim devised a series of 13 programmes on some of the composer’s most important works for television in the summer of 1969 with Christopher Nupen directing (and broadcast on Granada TV one year later). One of the works chosen for the series was the Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major, Op. 69 which Barenboim performed with du Pré. After the broadcasts, the original film disappeared and was long considered lost, until its rediscovery only a few years ago. 

In this performance, Nupen chose an interesting position to film the musicians in, with Barenboim in the forefront of the frame and du Pré placed behind him (this might have been inspired by Beethoven’s title for the work, ‘Sonata for Pianoforte and Violoncello’).

The performance is a wonderful example of two artists equally flying free and the Barenboim-du Pré duo fully capture the joy and spontaneity inherent in this beloved work.

The Ghost

In 1970, the Zukerman-du Pré-Barenboim Trio recorded Beethoven’s complete piano trios and also performed a series of concerts featuring the composer’s Triple Concerto and trios as part of the international celebrations for his bicentenary. Nupen had been in the audience for one such concert, in Oxford, and decided their interpretation of the famous ‘Ghost’ Trio in D Major, Op. 70, No. 1 would be ideal to capture on film. The backdrop for this was St. John’s, Smith Square in London and while only three cameras were used for filming, Nupen manages to give the impression of a nine-camera shoot – the whole work having been shot complete three times from three different positions. 

The first movement almost literally jumps onscreen at the viewer with its aural and visual vigour from all three musicians, who fully capture the tempo marking of ‘Allegro con brio’, and in the second movement (from which the trio gets its nickname), the intense concentration from the trio, especially in the quieter passages, simply take the breath away.

Although no-one knew it at the time, this would be the last performance of a full work featuring du Pré that Nupen would film.

Epilogue

While classical music has always been documented in one way or another since the birth of the gramophone in the late 1800s, Jacqueline du Pré certainly counts as one of the pioneering artists in the medium of filmed classical music as we now know it, and the fact she was filmed with such regularity – also a rarity, even for the 1960s – has certainly played a huge part in ensuring her reputation as an emblematic figure in the arts.
I first discovered the Nupen films of Jackie on VHS cassettes when I was a child beginning to learn the cello, and I, like so many other viewers, will never forget the impact of the very first time I saw her performance of the Elgar Concerto. Later on, while collecting many official (and unofficial) recordings, books, vintage programme books and photographs of du Pré, I had the good fortune of getting to know many close friends of du Pré personally, including Christopher Nupen and was privileged to forge a treasured friendship with ‘Christoforo’ that continued until his passing in 2023. He was a true artist, whose passion for his craft and high ideals never diminished with age, and each time I visited him in London, the bright twinkle in his eyes when talking about music, du Pré or his films were always in evidence and a delight to witness.

Nupen once said of of his friend, ‘she seemed almost uniquely able to fulfil the highest promise of great music to give us glimpses of eternity’, and in Jacqueline, conductor Sir John Barbirolli shares his admiration of du Pré, also defending her against the criticism of what some viewed as an exaggerated physicality in her playing, stating ‘you know, she’s sometimes accused of excessive emotions, but I love it! Because when you are young, you should have an excess of everything. If you haven’t an excess, what are you going to pare off as the years go by?’.
Whether it was playing for fun with friends, for a paying public or in front of a film camera, Jacqueline du Pré gave and shared her all with her cello and music, every time. While we shall never know how her playing would have fully developed, for she was not given the opportunity to live a normal lifespan which most of us take for granted, her importance as a musician remains as essential and relevant as ever, and thanks to each and every one of Christopher Nupen’s films with her, the world is blessed with enduring documents that continue to preserve the evergreen legacy of this singular artist, 80 years after her birth.