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depths, the child Jackie already felt: incapable of moving independently, fettered, her vital self paralyzed. And “don’t tell Mum”? The resignation of someone already aware of the futility of trying to convey her pain, fear and anxiety—hershadow side—to a parent unable to receive such communication. Much later, when multiple sclerosis struck, all Jackie’s lifelong resentment toward her mother erupted in bursts of uncontrolled, profane rage. The docile child became a profoundly hostile adult.
    As much as Jacqueline du Pré loved and craved the cello, something in her resisted the role of cello virtuoso. This virtuoso persona pre-empted her true self. It also became her only mode of emotional communication and her only way of keeping her mother’s attention. Multiple sclerosis was to be her means of casting off this role—her body’s way of saying no.
    Jacqueline herself was incapable of refusing the world’s expectations directly. At the age of eighteen, already in the public eye, she was wistfully envious of another young cellist who was then experiencing a crisis. “That girl is lucky,” she told a friend. “She could give up music if she wanted to. But I could never give it up because too many people have spent too much money on me.” The cello enabled her to soar to unimaginable heights and it shackled her. Terrified as she was of the toll a musical career would take on her, she succumbed to the impositions of her talent and her family’s needs.
    Hilary speaks of Jackie’s “cello voice.” Because Jackie’s direct means of emotional expression had been stifled early on, the cello became her voice. She poured all her intensity, pain, resignation—all her rage—into her music. As one of her cello teachers astutely observed when Jackie was an adolescent, she was forcing the instrument to express her internal aggression through her playing. When engaged in music, she was fully animated by emotions that were diluted or absent everywhere else in her life. This is why she was so was riveting to watch and so often painful to listen to—“almost scary” in the words of the Russian cellist Misha Maisky.
    Twenty years after her childhood debut, now ill with MS, Jackie told a friend what she had felt on first finding herself on stage. “It was as if until that moment she had in front of her a brick wall which blocked her communication with the outside world. But the moment Jackie started to play for an audience, that brick wall vanished and she felt able to speak at last. It was a sensation that never left her when she performed.” As an adult she was to write in her diary that she had never known how to speak in words, only through music.
    Her relationship with her husband, Daniel Barenboim, dominated the last phase of Jacqueline du Pré’s life before multiple sclerosis ended her cello playing. A charming, cultured and cosmopolitan Argentine Jew who had grown up in Israel, Barenboim by his early twenties was a supernova in the international musical galaxy. He was a sought-after concert pianist and chamber musician and was also making a name for himself as a conductor. When du Pré and Barenboim met, the musical communication between them was spontaneously electric, passionate, even mystical. A love affair and marriage were inevitable. It seemed a fairy-tale romance; they became the glamour couple of the classical music world.
    Unfortunately, Jackie could no more be her true self in her marriage than in her family of origin. People who knew her well soon noticed that she spoke with a curious, “indefinable” mid-Atlantic accent. This unconscious adoption of her husband’s mode of speaking signalled the merging of her identity with that of another, more dominant personality. Hilary writes that once more Jackie was fitting herself to someone else’s needs and expectations: “The wide-open spaces of her personality had little chance for expression except through their music-making.
She had to be the