Jacqueline du Pré was a British classical cellist. She was born in Oxford on 26 January 1945, the second daughter of Derek du Pré, an accountant who later edited The Accountant, and Iris Greep, a pianist, composer and teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her mother wrote a collection of pieces for her, published as Songs for My Cello and Me. Du Pré had an older sister, Hilary, and a younger brother, Piers.
She began studying at the London Cello School with Alison Dalrymple at the age of five and soon won local music competitions. At ten she received the Suggia Gift Award in an international competition, enabling her to study privately and at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama with William Pleeth from 1955 to 1961. She won the Guilhermina Suggia Award in 1956, the Guildhall School’s gold medal and the Queen’s Prize for British Musicians in 1960. Her further training included Pablo Casals’s masterclasses in Zermatt in 1960, short courses with Paul Tortelier in Paris in 1962, and several months of lessons with Mstislav Rostropovich in the Soviet Union in 1966.
Du Pré gave her first Wigmore Hall recital in London on 1 March 1961, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. She performed Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Rudolf Schwarz at the Royal Festival Hall in 1962, then played it at the London Proms in 1963 under Malcolm Sargent. Its success led to further Proms performances of the concerto over the following three years. On 3 September 1964, she gave the world premiere of Priaulx Rainier’s Cello Concerto. A regular Proms performer until 1969, she gained international prominence through her 1965 EMI recording of the Elgar concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli. That year she also made her United States debut at Carnegie Hall, performing the work with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Antal Doráti.
She appeared with orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, New Philharmonia Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Her regular conductors included Barbirolli, Sargent, Adrian Boult, Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta and Leonard Bernstein. She married Barenboim in Jerusalem in 1967, and they frequently performed together, with him as conductor or pianist. She also played chamber music with Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman, Mehta and Pinchas Zukerman. In 1968, she formed a piano trio with Barenboim and Zukerman, which toured widely; Christopher Nupen’s 1969 film The Trout documented the trio, joined by Perlman and Mehta, performing Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A major at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.
In 1971, du Pré began losing sensation in her fingers and other parts of her body. Her final studio recording, of sonatas by Chopin and Franck, was made in December that year. In February 1973, she gave her last London concerts, playing Elgar’s concerto with the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Mehta. Her final public appearances were in New York later that month, where she performed three of four planned performances of Brahms’s Double Concerto with Zukerman, the New York Philharmonic and Bernstein. Multiple sclerosis was diagnosed in October 1973. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1976 and received the 1977 BRIT Award for the best classical soloist recording of the preceding 25 years for her Elgar concerto recording. She occasionally gave masterclasses after retiring from performance.
Du Pré died in London on 19 October 1987, aged 42, from acute pneumonia. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Golders Green.
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