Transcrição do Vídeo

JACQUELINE DU PRÉ AND THE ELGAR CELLO CONCERTO

[Narrator] Jacqueline du Pré was one of the finest performing musicians that England has produced in the past 300 years. She had the rarest of talents, combining dazzling virtuosity with an absolute natural conviction that carried all before it. Her talent blossomed young as the following films will show, and she seemed to fit exactly the phrase that Clara Schumann once used to Johannes Brahms: “to have been sent into the world ready made”. In this film her teacher William Pleeth says that he could see her remarkable gifts on the very first day, and as the next few lessons unfolded, one could see sort of endlessness and everything was possible. But it was not to be. The girl who knew that she had within herself gifts with endless possibilities grew into the woman who watched the force of Nature robbing her slowly and mercilessly of her ability to express those very gifts. Most of the film was made in 1967, but after Jacqueline du Pré’s career was halted by multiple sclerosis she did everything she could to use her talents and her experience to the full. And so in 1981 we made a new introduction to the film which shows something of the way in which her extraordinary spirit came to terms with her illness.
It was precisely her way of doing things both in her life and in her music that penetrated so deep into the imagination with this beautiful woman, the personality and the talent was so combined, so natural and so apparently incorruptible that she seemed almost uniquely able to fulfill the promise of great music, to give us glimpses of eternity.
[02:39] On the 21st of March 1962, Jacqueline du Pré gave her first performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall in London. She was just 17 years old, seemingly far too young to make the most of an autumnal work that has all the hallmarks of late maturity. But it soon it became clear to many of those present that in Jacqueline du Pré’s young hands, Elgar’s melancholy masterpiece would one day have its finest interpretation. On the following morning, Nevile Cardis, one of England’s distinguished writers on music described the work in the Guardian as “a swan song of rare and vanishing beauty”, and he concluded his review with these words: “those actually present will witness on the first day of Spring to an early blossoming in Miss du Pré’s playing, and such a beautiful blossoming as this year or any other year is likely to know for a long time to come.”

A SWAN SONG OF RARE AND VANISHING BEAUTY

[M. Welsh] You want the same in each bar on the bowing thing?
[Jacqueline du Pré] Yes, except for the last bar from the C sharp {ela canta} so with the B.
[M. Welsh] Ah, yes, I see.

[Narrator] Twenty years later, Jacqueline du Pré remains as close to Elgar’s Concerto as the circumstances permit and her passion for the work can devise. She is here working with a friend and fellow cellist Moray Welsh on the interpretation and fingering for her students. She can no longer play the cello. Her extraordinary and unforgettable talent was muted in 1973 by multiple sclerosis, but her enthusiasm for music remains undimmed and her perception, both of music and of people has actually developed with the experience and passage of time. She remains a brave and adventurous spirit, in the past ten years she has taught both privately and in master classes, she has become the focal point of a massive research project for multiple sclerosis. She has narrated Carnival of the Animals for radio and Peter and the Wolf for a gramophone recording. She’s been awarded the OBE, received honored doctors from five British universities and in 1980 she was nominated Musician of the Year by the Incorporated Society of Musicians but in all of this the Elgar Concerto has remained a constant theme in her life.

[M.Welsh] Do you want the same fingering the second time it’s repeated?
[J. du Pré] No, because I think that’s harmonically too. The more important one the second time. So it’s 1 4-4 2 1 then bow definitely moving first.
[M.Welsh] The same thing?

[Narrator] Happily we made a film on her in 1967, which traces some of the more important events in her exceptional relationships with this work and ended with a complete performance of it with the New Philarmonia Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
Her performance of the Elgar’s Concerto in the film is extraordinary by any standards and for many is quite unforgettable. Even when she played first at the Royal Festival Hall her interpretation focused new attention on the inherent p……….ss in the work, and watching it and hearing it as she plays it here in the film few would think that her projection of Elgar’s melancholy could actually have deepened as the years went by. [música]
[9:46] It’s Elgar’s final masterpiece and one of the world’s great cello concertos but there is more to it than that and Nevile C’s phrase could not be more appropriate. It’s indeed a lamenting farewell to beauty, which in his despairing days Elgar described as a man’s attitude to life.
What Jacqueline du Pré would make of it now it’s something that we can only guess at, but in her mind she remains as close to it as ever. And so here at her express wish is a reedited version of the film we made in 1967.
[11:22] There are just a few in any generation, musicians which unstakable qualities that make the rare but familiar figure of the internationally acclaimed artist. It’s one of the most totally absorbing of all professions that demands not only great fantasy, and the God given talent to communicate but the character and will to develop it, and the essential single-mindedness from the earliest age. The demands are high and are met by just a few. At 22, Jacqueline du Pré is already among them.

She was born in 1945, but the name du Pre comes from Jersey, where the family can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. Early talents to dancing, singing and drawing were fostered by her mother, a concert pianist known by her maiden name of Iris Kreave. But her talents took no special direction until the age of 4, when she first heard the cello.

[12-54] [JdP] Well I heard it on the radio when I was very small, when I was four and, although I don’t remember the sound at all I liked so much apparently that I asked my mother to give me the thing that made that sound, and she did! She gave me a big big cello, which I loved to play, but she ---------- more accurately about that.

[Iris] I knew she was musical because she could tap rhythms that I tapped for her from a very early age, before she was a year old. And she could also sing in tune before she could talk. So I thought it would’ve been a good idea for she to play the cello, especially as I play the piano and Hilary played the piano. And so I got an enormous cello, much much too big for her, she was completely lost behind it, and I wrote some tunes for her to play.

[Jacqueline du Pré] She was marvelous because she has a great talent for teaching small children, and, she started off by writing little tunes for me, when I could hardly play the thing at all, and she added words to these tunes, on the opposite side of the page she drew beautiful pictures illustrating the tunes, and she used to do this when I was asleep, and I could hardly wait till the morning came, because in the morning I’d wake up and find this beautiful thing waiting for me, and we dressed on and played together. That really made me very excited about the cello. [14.08] When I was 6 my mother thought it was time I went to a proper teacher, so I went to the London Cello School, and it was there that this beautiful big cello was taken away from me because I was too small, and I was given one just about this big and my pride was so hurt, I suffered quite a lot for a little while.

[15:09] [Narrator] The suffering was not too serious and may even have strengthened the exceptional determination and ability, which were already beginning to show.

[Iris] She had tremendous power of concentration right from the very beginning, and an instinctive feeling for phrasing and for the instrument itself. In fact, she often gave me a new angle on how to phrase a certain piece of music, and she was two different people, she was the ordinary happy child when she was playing with other people, other friends, but when she was playing the cello she became immediately in a world completely her own and I remember when she was very young, 7 years old, taking part in a London Festival, competitive festival, there was a long corridor leading to the room where the competition was to be held, and she was very excited at the thought of playing, and she skipped on at the corridor feeling very happy to be met by the person at the door, who said: `It’s easy to see you’ve just been played, you just had your turn!`, she said: Oh, no, I’m just going to play! And when she played she had that ability to hold the audience, she compelled people to listen to her. After 4 years at the Cello School we knew she had to have a long-term teacher, it was then that I thought of Bill Pleeth, I’ve always admired his playing.

[William Pleeth] I think the greatest impression is one of the impact of being able to give a human being a tremendous amount and seeing that amount return so that you hit back and the tremendous climb had such force and inevitability that, you can sort of see and endlessness in development. I think it was one of the most impressive things, because I’m hitting the ball against the wall and it always return, of course the more you hit the more it would return, so that you’ve never had a sort to of blank period where something got stuck for a moment.

[Narrator] Would you say now that when you first saw her that you could see the potential was there?

[William Pleeth] Yes, you could see it quite strongly on the first day and, as the nest few lessons went on, it just sort of unfolded, so like a flower, so much that you knew then that you had sort of endlessness on that, everything was possible.

[Narrator] To prove it, she became within a year the youngest contendant for the valuable Suggia Gift, the chairman of the panel was Sir John Barbirolli.

[Sir John Barbirolli] I remember vividly the day Jackie came before us and one of my chief colleagues on the panel is Lionel Tertis, the greatest of all English instrumentalists and I remember that Jackie be playing for about 2 or 3 minutes and I turned to Lionel and said: This is it! And it has been a wonderful experience for me to see this tremendous, wonderful, natural cello talent flower as it has and flower musically as well as instrumentally, you know, she is sometimes accused of excessive emotion, but I love it! Because when you’re young you should have an excess of everything, if you don’t have that excess, what are you going to pair off as the years go by?

[18:36] [Dueto: Willem de Fesch – Sonata em Do Maior]

[Jacqueline du Pré] Very Nice!
[Willam Pleeth] Do you want to do the next one?
[Jacqueline du Pré] Yes, that’s my favorite!
[WilliamPleeth] It’s your favorite.
Honestly, it’s so many …………..such a talent, her musical memory, her development, her dynamic, her personality,, they’re sort of in a burn, ……………….dramatic all these points, I mean, they’re so …………….apart for a sort of intriguing aspects of unfoldingness, or, ………….

[Narrator] Unfolding it certainly did and in the next few years she won most of the available prizes, among them all the cello prizes at the Guildhall School, the Queen’s Prize and the Gulbenkian ……… Awards. By 16 she felt ready for her London debut.

[Jacqueline du Pré] It was a big occasion for me, I never really get an important concert in London and I was beginning with a Haendel Sonata and during the first movement the A string began very very slowly to unwind and the string got flatter and flatter and I was playing higher and higher, then the whole thing went straight down and I had to start again! Which in fact was a great help because I was nervous for the big event, and after that having gained an extra ………….of sympathy from the audience it was easier, friendly to start again.

[Narrator] In the following year, 1962, she gave her first performance of the Elgar Concerto, the start of a special association with this work, when she played it at the Festival Hall in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rudolph Schwartz. Later in the same year she gave her first television recital accompanied by her mother, and there’s no mistaking in bringing authority.

[Iris] It was this time, just when she had tremendous success that she began to have serious doubts as to whether she was good enough. She just wondered if she had the ability to carry on with this tremendous career, and she became very depressed, and just was completely lost for a time, she didn’t touch the cello at all, and she had to find something else to do, do you remember?

[Jackie`s father] Very well indeed, we were both worried, but, we knew fundamentally she would get over it, she was determined eventually to be a cellist, she forced it, she did all sorts of other activities, she ………….., she fenced, she did yoga, all sorts of ……………., it wasn’t until years later she wrote us and said: now I have decided I shall become a cellist.

[Jacqueline du Pré] I was changing form a child into an adult and, what to call a different kind of an aspect, I didn’t have that many engagements and, I felt a little bit lost until I went to Dartington and I had a good time there and, also, had some lessons with Tortelier and subsequently went to Paris with him. In between, when I was 15, I took part in two master classes with Casals in Zermat which was very interesting, but I was a rather bulshy 15 year old, very proud of my own teacher, I didn’t want to accept what Casals had said to me, even though he was Casals. Later on I went to Moscow to have some lessons with Rostropovich, and both these stays with these two cellists were very exciting and interesting, but, I always ……………….my real teacher, my sort of Cello Daddy in fact.

[23:57] [Narrator] Under William Pleeth`s guidance her playing continued to mature in spite of her worries and the increasing demands of the profession, or perhaps even because of them.

[Narrator] After returning to London from her study with Tortelier in Paris she had formed a successful duo with the American pianist Stephen Bishop, and in 1965 she toured America for the first time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. She was an immense success and in particular won a new and enthusiastic audience for the Elgar Cello Concerto. Just over a year later she repeated the success in Russia, once again with the BBC Orchestra and Sir John Barbirolli, with whom she had recently recorded it.

[Jacqueline du Pré] Well, I’ve been an incredible lucky person because in the course of my concert giving life I’ve been given two marvelous Strads. The first Strad I had a little while before my Wigmore recital and, about three years ago, I was given my second instrument, and it’s called the Davidoff, after a great figure in Moscow. I was called up by a fiddle dealer in London called Charles Beare and he told me that there was an instrument waiting for me to try, and if I liked it, it was going to be given to me as an anonymous gift, and I went along and saw it and fell in love with it, and…had it!

[Charles Beare] Well, we were asked by a firm of solicitors to look out for a really first class Stradivari cello, to be purchased for her use. This we did and after some time we heard that the famous Davidoff was going to be coming up for sale in New York. This is a cello that was made in 1712, it…………….about 25 years in New York and before that its history is known back in the middle of the 19th century, when it was in Russia. It belonged to one count, and it was sold to another Russian count, we’re told, for a large sum of money, another cello, and the finest horse in the stable. And the second count presented Carl Davidoff, a leading cellist in his day in St Petersburg as a birthday present. So it has not been given before. It’s one of about……………, of about 20 cellos that are accepted as being the best, it’s a glorious sounding instrument, it’s a beautiful looking instrument and, I think really, it’s probably among the three or four finest cellos in the world.
Good, it’s good to see it again. Do you want to play a few notes, have a go!

[Narrator] Living with the Davidoff has its problems, quite apart from the need for the constant professional care, particularly in a life as busy as this.

[Jacqueline du Pré] I think I first became busy after I came back from France, I think it was my first taste really of moving around the world and I enjoyed very very much, I was ............down. The only span in the works is the cello and busily cello!

[Narrator] In 1966 they traveled over 40.000 miles together for concert engagements with a dozen different orchestras and conductors and duos with Stephen Bishop, but in spite of increasing demands, she found time for a renewed interest in chamber music with Hugh Wire and Fut Song, and it was at F. Song’s home, during one of these evenings that she met Daniel Barenboim.

[Daniel Barenboim] the way we met, the way we got to know each other, I’m afraid, is a very unromantic tale, the first we had in common was glandular fever and they came to see me, I was lying in bed as good patient I was complaining that I had pains here and here, everywhere, it’s unpleasant and they all said that’s bad, you should see Jacqueline du Pré, you know. After you hear that three or four times, you know, naturally I became very curious so I phoned her agents and I asked for her telephone number, at that time we were supposed to make the record of the Haydn Boccherini Concertos so, I mean, there have been some sort of professional contact over the telephone, and I phoned her up and I said, you know, who I was, and that I knew she had glandular fever, and we started to compare notes, you know, who was more swollen under the ear, things like that. And this went on for a few days and we never met because I left and she went elsewhere, and it was not until Christmas of 67, no it must be 66 that we met at F. Song’s house who was a common friend of ours and in a sort of very musical way, instead of saying good evening we played Brahms, this is how we got to know each other.

[31:57] [Narrator] Their musical afinity and the tremendous sense of fun in their music making brought them quickly together – and they bought just about the entire cello and piano repertoire.

[JdP] This is incredibly funny: “A Frog Went a Courting” by Hindemith.
[Daniel Barenboim] This is all Hindemith.
[JdP]Yes, the whole thing?
[Daniel Barenboim] The whole thing. This is a sonata for cello and piano or two celli alone by Kraft, this was Haydn’s pupil.

[Narrator] And then, rather shyly, they played Beethoven and Brahms at short notice in Northhampton for their first public performance together. In April they gave their first orchestral concert for the Royal Philarmonic Society with the English Chamber Orchestra and then recorded both the Haydn and Boccherini concertos for EMI. By the end of April they were engaged and because of the busy Summer season, planned their wedding for September but in May the Israeli-Arab war threatened.

[JdP] Daniel and I were pretty involved with the business as it all went along and were reading the papers assiduously for as long as it went on, until we had a phone call from Israel saying that his parents thought the war was going to begin this evening, that evening, which was in fact 10 days before the war. Danny, without any thought at all, was gettiong ready to go and I wanted to go desparately too, I wanted to go, to be with him, ,because I thought my place was with him and so I went with him. We arrived on what we thought was the eve of the war but all the lights were everywhere and in fact there was no war. It was a very tense situation nevertheless; we wanted to try and do something and we started giving concerts and in fact we played every day, Danny conducting and playing the piano himself; we played Schumann and Saint-Saens, and it was in fact a marvelous atmosphere to play because one felt that music was something enormously wanted.
We played at a concert which was “Victory Concert” in fact in Jerusalem and then, because we’ve been through so much together and because it felt the right time, the right place, everybody was feeling so happy, we got married!

[Sir John Barbirolli] It very …………..lively to I remember that I was in Tel-Aviv the day they got married and it …………….to be able to propose a wedding toast to these two geniuses.

[35:36] [Daniel Barenboim] It was entirely her choice and although I was very touched that she did want to come and I think that is part of her whole make-up, she’s not only living for her career like so many lady musicians who have this sort of, almost complex about it, they have to go at it harder than a man. She doesn’t have it at all, she’s interested in being a happy person first of all, a human being and, this is actually on of the things that impressed me most about her when I first met her.

[JdP] I’ve never been the kind of musician who wants to have a concert every day of the week, and who wants to be a slave of their instrument and to their concerts. I can very happily fit them in because I have my concerts fairly well spaced out and can spend most of my time with Daniel in fact.

[Daniel Barenboim] She has her own travels and I have my own but we have planned in such a way that we don’t have to be separated for any long periods and we are doing all the long tours together but, in connection with that I can only tell that I don’t think the family ties in any way have anything to do with the musical afinity and the fact that we got married or anything like that, this was one of the first things that I felt as we were playhing in a complete improvised way at Song’s house we played some Brahms sonatas and things and I felt it straight away and this a lot of people I think mistake for something, you know, it sounded so romantic, these two people are in love therefore they play very well together; I know lots of people who play very well together they’re not in love and I know lots of people who are in love and don’t play very well together, so it’s really something completely different. [música: Brahms, 2.o movimento]

[Daniel B.] Are you comfortable sitting there...
[JdP] That was nice, it had a much friendlier…
[DB] In the Haydn I was very happy, I could see at least!

[Narrator] What’s she like to accompany?
[DB] Difficult, in the sense that, it’s so natural to her, that it doesn’t donours her sometimes that we mortals have difficulties in following her, I’m sure she feels it so natural she doesn’t even realize the difficulties that make music-making interesting and adventurous, it’s something you love when you do it.

[Narrator] Can you be more specific?
[DB] She has sometimes a rather free idea of tempi and tempi fluctuations but it all comes so much from inside with her, it’s not something that she searches for and I’m sure most of the time she doesn’t even realize she is fluctuating, you know, ,but we who have to beat, of course, find it sometimes very hard.

[Sir John Barbirolli] And all I say is, God bless her, and may she have a very great career which has already begun, because such heaven sent gifts don’t appear every day.

THE END

Word transcription: Clodoaldo Leite Junior 2006