Music: Inside the Outside Family

“Instead of saying ‘Good Evening,’ ” says Jacqueline Du Pré, recalling the night four years ago when she first met Daniel Barenboim at a London party, “we sat down and played Brahms.” He was a coiled, compact and energetic Israeli of 24, and one of the best-known young pianists in the world. She was 21, and already Britain’s leading cellist, a tall, smiling, shy English lass with a stunning kind of farm-fresh beauty. Instant karma. Two weeks later, Barenboim decided he wanted to marry Jacqueline. Six months later he did. Thus began one of the most remarkable relationships, personal as well as professional, that music has known since the days of Clara and Robert Schumann.

In the world’s musical citadels, the Barenboim-Du Pré charm is rivaled today only by such soirée idols as Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta. They do not enjoy separation, and arrange their schedules to be with each other as much as possible. Their home is London, and for three months a year they stay there, working out of a cluttered, low-ceilinged basement flat near Baker Street that was once Jacqueline’s student digs. Still, as partners or single acts, Du Pré and Barenboim are willing to travel anywhere in the world to make music, and usually do.

Passionate Embrace. Last week at Manhattan’s Philharmonic Hall was typical, as the pair embarked on the first of two joint recitals of all of Beethoven’s music for cello and piano. With a quick glance at each other, they launched into the brief unison opening of the Sonata, Opus 5, No. 1.

Though it was strictly harmony and counterpoint from then on, a certain unison of thought and execution dominated their recital. The performance—notable, among other things, for the way Jacqueline sometimes wrapped her long, graceful arms around the cello in a passionate embrace—fully deserved the audience’s round enthusiasm and more than sellout house.

Like Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the Barenboim and Du Pré team proves that the sight and sound of two brilliant artists conquering continents hand in hand has a magical allure all its own. But there is far more to these players than such allure. Today Jacqueline’s cello playing is a marvel of tonal beauty and instinctive emotion, backed by a prodigious technical grasp. As aurorally mellow as the late Emanuel Feuermann, as powerful of phrase as one of her former mentors Pablo Casals, Jacqueline is one of the most eloquent and soulful cellists alive.

Daniel’s field has more lions in it. If not the best pianist in the under-30 group, he is certainly one of the busiest and most versatile men in music history. He gives 200 concerts a year on five continents. In London he is moving into television. He is getting busier and busier as a conductor, too, in the international style in which he does everything. When friends urge him to slow down, he reminds them of what the late Sir John Barbirolli once said: “When you’re young you should have an excess of everything. If you haven’t excess, what are you going to pare off as the years go by?”

Barenboim is preparing plenty for the paring. Currently on a three-month U.S. tour, he is now two-thirds through his umpty-umpth cycle of the 32 Beethoven sonatas at Manhattan’s Tully Hall. He is also well into a guest-conducting series with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Next month he will conduct the New York Philharmonic for four weeks. His Angel disks (36 to date) seem to come along these days as regularly as books on ecology or space fiction.

Intriguing Figure. Both Daniel and Jacqueline were hard at work at their chosen instruments by the age of five. Born in Oxford (father was an accounting executive, mother a pianist-composer), Jacqueline went to a London cello school at six, began studying privately at ten. Buenos Aires-born Daniel was a true child prodigy. His parents (both music teachers) moved to Tel Aviv because they thought that Israel was the place to educate a Jewish boy. At ten he was traveling the capitals of the world giving recitals in short pants. Hustle, shrewdness and charm did the rest.

With his successes and failings tightly linked together, Barenboim is one of the most intriguing figures in music today. His pudgy little hands fly over the keyboard, and he is a prodigious sight reader. The trouble, some critics contend not unjustly, is that he spends too much time sight-reading and not enough time thinking about the works he already knows. But Barenboim’s surface accomplishment is perhaps a peculiar result of the frantic musical life he has so far chosen to lead.

Quite simply, Barenboim has not yet decided what kind of pianist he really wants to be. Five years ago, he rippled off Mozart sonatas and Beethoven concertos in a smooth, glassy style, as opposed to the passionate, warmly phrased playing of the late Artur Schnabel, Van Cliburn, even Daniel’s friend Vladimir Ashkenazy. Barenboim’s more recent recordings of Mozart’s concertos Nos. 17, 20 and 21 are still too bland and bloodless. This year’s set of the complete Beethoven 32 (like his current Tully Hall cycle) has weaknesses, notably a prevailing glibness in the remote, mysterious late sonatas. But his approach has deepened to provide brilliant moments, poetic tone painting as well as intellect. Clearly, Barenboim is working on his problems. As he puts it disarmingly: “You don’t get better at music by not playing it.”

As if their public careers were not enough, Du Pré and Barenboim are the magnetic center for a clubby group of musical jet-setters known affectionately and with some envy as the “musical mafia.” It consists of Ashkenazy, Violinists Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman, plus Mehta, who is reliably reported to play a mean double bass. The group meets four or five times a year to play chamber music. “We are more than friends,” says Mehta. “If there could be something like a family outside a family, that’s what we have.”