Music: Twisted Sister - Review

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Jay Nordlinger

Jacqueline du Pre is perhaps music's most tragic case. The outlines of her story are familiar: an English cello prodigy, the winner of every award in sight. Marriage to another young star, the pianist Daniel Barenboim. Recordings, tours, intimations that she would make the world forget Casals and Rostropovich. Then, multiple sclerosis at 28. An agonizing twilight. Death at 42, universally bewailed.

It has now been 25 years since du Pre was forced to put down her bow. All that while, she has dwelt in music-loving hearts (particularly English ones) as a kind of angel: blonde, joyous, ethereally gifted-a light, cruelly snuffed out. Recently, however, her peace and image have been disturbed by a movie, based on a book by her sister, Hilary. The film depicts the great cellist as a depraved and ditzy beast. The musical community is outraged-and rightly so. Hilary and Jackie is surely the lowest act of sisterly revenge and hatred ever committed to film. It is a reprehensible work.

The movie opens with two little girls, both musical, but one more promising-Hilary. Gradually, Jackie overtakes her, fired by the desire to be superior, and to be primary in their mother's affections. Hilary has no choice but to give way, subordinating her own ambitions to the bratty meteor that is Jackie. The viewer is to understand one thing clearly: Hilary would have been big stuff, if not for the selfishness of her sister, the favoritism of her mother, and her own good grace and preference for a quieter life.

As the film's Jackie gains international renown, she comes to despise her cello, regarding herself as its prisoner rather than its well- pleased master. Mentally unstable, she seeks refuge in her one true friend-Hilary, of course, the movie's heroine-who by this time is living in the countryside with her husband, Christopher Finzi (son of the composer Gerald). Jackie then makes a twisted demand: to engage in a sexual relationship with Finzi, her brother-in-law. Hilary, ever selfless and put upon, obliges (as does the stud). Therapy for the genius, you know.

When illness mounts, Jackie is reduced to a shaking, crippled, incontinent mess. Her husband abandons her for another woman, with whom he has children. Jackie sits by the phone and waits for his calls. ("Is that a baby I hear?" she asks during one of them. If you can ever look at Barenboim again, after this film, it will be a miracle.) Alone in her apartment, Jackie manipulates her paws to play one of her records, the Elgar Concerto (here turned into a bathetic anthem). This verges on emotional pornography. "I just want to play again!" Jackie cries, the most plangent words a musician can speak.

At movie's end, there is Hilary-long-suffering, sympathetic Hilary- Hilary who alone can comfort Jackie, despite the many slights, Hilary who, the movie tells you, was really (if you must know the truth) better than Jackie deserved.

The film has ignited a furor, especially in London, center of du Pre's activities. A group of her closest colleagues (including Rostropovich) sent a bristling letter to the Times. Clare Finzi, Hilary's daughter, charged that the film was a "gross misinterpretation, which I cannot let go unchallenged." Students from the Royal College of Music picketed the premiere. Barenboim-who has always teetered on the edge of villainy in du Pre-revering quarters-said, "Couldn't they have waited until I was dead?"

Hilary du Pre, for her part, has complained that she is "being portrayed as self-serving and mendacious" (do tell?). She regards the movie as "a love letter to the sister who will always be part of me." Indeed, she has watched the movie ten times (as of January 21)-savoring again and again her triumph in a sick, one-sided game of sibling rivalry some twelve years after Jacqueline du Pre's death, and many more after she was incapacitated. Perhaps the wisest remarks came from Barenboim, who, refusing further comment, said, "We are fortunate to have many documents of Jacqueline's playing. She lives on in the music."

So she does. Du Pre's discography is ample, for one who had so few years to record, though it suffers from the absence of the complete Bach suites, the heart and glory of the cello repertoire.

EMI has packaged eight concertos, including the Elgar. Du Pre, as these discs attest, was a thrilling cellist, possessed of a dark, slightly coarse tone and a commanding, if imperfect, technique. She dug deep into the strings and played with a liberality of expression, even if she was not the untamed Romantic of myth. Her Haydn, for example, is exuberant, but well within the bounds of Classical taste. Her DvorUak is oddly uninspired, but she would have made several more recordings of this staple, as the top cellists always do, when they have the time.

Her Elgar, it is true, is extraordinary-even definitive. This is in part thanks to the presence of Sir John Barbirolli on the podium, but the cellist, in this work, is his musical equal, even at 20. EMI once coupled this recording with Dame Janet Baker's performance of Elgar's Sea Pictures. The disc was a testament to all that is magnificent in British musicianship.