Shocking details of a cellist's life

MANILA, Philippines - The film impact of Shine and Hilary & Jackie was revealing even among non-music aficionados. Perhaps one way to improve musical education in this country is to expose both young and adult audiences to quality films revolving around the life of musicians.

If the themes of love, intrigue and obsession are common, they are even more pronounced in the musical world.

Competition between voice teachers and their pupils reached absurd, if, comic, proportions in the Belgian film, The Music Teacher directed by Gerard Corbiau. The battle of tenors in the film reminded me of real-life rivalry between sopranos who had the same colorful teacher.

Stage actress Baby Barredo — who once figured in the Pergolesi opera, La Serva Padrona — once told me that the reason she bolted the opera world and jumped into the theater without regrets was because she couldn’t stand the intrigues in the opera scene.

The subject of illicit love and labor unrest in the orchestra world were given satiric expression in Meeting Venus.

In the Regal Film Laro Sa Baga based on the novel of Edgardo Reyes, Chito Roño unmasked a matron’s artistic pretension by showing her making love to her favorite portrait painter (played by Carlos Morales) with Puccini’s Un bel di (from Madama Butterfly) playing in the background.

One fine film that didn’t quite make it to Manila was Music of the Heart which is about a violinist (Meryl Streep) who bravely introduced classical music in the public schools of Harlem where black parents didn’t want their children to “waste their time on the music of dead white men” (this line reminded me of what I heard in my island province when I brought classical artists in the island: What we need in our place are piggery projects and abaca livelihood projects — not classical music).

If Shine showcased the immense power of the piano, Hilary & Jackie certainly scored a lot of musical points for the relatively unpopular cello.

Geoffrey Rush who played the role of the Australian piano prodigy, David Helfgott, won the Oscar for Best Actor and Emily Watson, who played the cellist, was nominated for the Oscar after an earlier Oscar nomination for another film, Breaking the Waves.

To make the role convincing, Emily took cello lessons and the preparation paid off handsomely in the film.

Anand Tucker’s Hilary & Jackie is about two musically gifted sisters, one a flutist played by Rachel Griffiths and the other, the celebrated English cellist, Jacqueline Du Pre, played in the movie by Emily.

The movie has enough informative concert scenes to make the viewer curious about this musical instrument called the cello. There is one backstage scene after Du Pre’s Wigmore Hall debut when a rich admirer gifted her with a Stradivarius Davidoff (1712) cello, which costs more than a million US dollars.

The film also allowed non-music lovers to realize that the cello — though not as popular as the piano and the violin — is gaining more acceptance in the performances of Filipino cellists like Wilfredo Pasamba (he organized an all-cello ensemble at St. Scholastica’s College and is, in fact, the first cello graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, the first Filipina piano graduate of which was Rowena Arrieta), Ramon Bolipata, Renato Lucas and that brilliant scholar from the Philippine High School for the Arts, Victor Michael Coo, who won rousing cheers for his cello debut with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra under Rodel Colmenar. Fact is the Elgar cello concerto played in the movie by Emily was heard live for the first time in the Philippines some years back with cellist Renato Lucas, who was the soloist of the Philippine Philharmonic under Oscar Yatco.

When filmmaker Marilou Diaz-Abaya heard cellist Pasamba in a Saint Saens cello concerto played with the Cebu Youth Symphony Orchestra at the CCP in March last year, she contemplated on using the cello in her film, Muro-Ami (she did not as it won’t jibe with the film’s mostly underwater scenes of the film).

Rostropovich — under whom Du Pre studied from January to May 1966 in Moscow — was heard in Manila in the ‘80s playing the Dvorak cello concerto after which former First Lady, Imelda Marcos gave him a distinguished International Artist citation. When Du Pre finished her master’s class with Rostropovich, the latter remarked he had finally found someone who will continue his work as a cellist (he turned to conducting later and one of the soloists he has worked with when he took over the Washington D.C.-based National Symphony was no other than Cecile Licad). Siegfred Helm, an authority on the cello, once commented that on the whole, Jacqueline Du Pre belongs to the distinguished group of Pablo Casals and Rostropovich who could make their instruments “sing.”

Dame Margot Fonteyn, also a frequent Manila visitor, was also portrayed in Hilary & Jackie as the one who gave Du Pre temporary shelter before her death in 1987.

A scene from the movie where Dame Margot was seen conversing with Du Pre in the hospital while she was visited by her sister, Hilary, had a cellist telling the English prima ballerina assoluta, “My sister used to play the flute but she gave it up in favor of marriage. Now she no longer plays music; just feeds chickens in the countryside. But she has a marvelous husband who makes love very well. I borrowed him from my sister and if you want, you can try him.”

The movie was based on the book, A Genius in the Family written by Du Pre’s sister and brother, Hilary and Piers du Pre. Reviewer Michael Hartgraves (an avowed Du Pre cello fan) wrote of the book, “This book could tarnish one’s image of Jacqueline Du Pre. There are family secrets that you may find painful to read. Think of how painful they must have been to write. Think of how painful they must have been to experience.”

In the movie, the most shocking sequence seen by Manila audiences was how Hilary, shared her husband with sister, Jackie, out of love.

But the most touching message of the film is the question: Is there life after concertizing?

Jacqueline Du Pre was a highly revered, world famous musician. But as the film showed, she was miserable in private life because she also longed for moments that have nothing to do with music — like loving moments with her sister, Hilary, and romping in the fields with her nephews and nieces. When Jackie noted that her sister was happy even without music because of a loving, caring husband, she wanted to share her happiness to the extent of asking her sister that her husband make love to her as well.

Even with audience adulation. Du Pre was asking her equally famous husband and conductor, Daniel Barenboim: Will you still love me even if I stop playing well?

Of course, the most riveting element of the story is the overwhelming friendship of the two sisters even as, later, they would find themselves rivals in the field of music. She won acclaim as a cellist. The other didn’t do as well as a flutist. When Hilary told her sister she is getting married, the following conversation ensued:

Jackie: Why are you marrying him?

You don’t have to. You can have men and not be tied to them. Just use contraceptives (shows one to her). So, why are you marrying him?

Hilary: Because he makes me feel special?

After a pregnant pause, came the reply.

Jackie: The truth is, you are not special.

At some point in Du Pre’s career, she thought that music was unreal — that pianos and cellos are mere props for fame-and-fortune obsessed people. As Du Pre once intimated with Rostropovich after the end of her master class in Moscow: “I’ve never been a career demon. I love playing cello, playing to the people, but I’ve never wanted to do it every day and every hour of my life.”

Will a film on musicians become a possibility in this country in the future:

Marilou, who cried after watching Hilary & Jackie in Germany, said one of the film projects she would like to will likely revolve on the story of young musicians. One of the few ideas in her drawing board is a story about gifted children.

Says Abaya: “I am actually looking at the little lives at the National Arts Center in Mt. Makiling and I am asking the question: What is sacrifice in the altar of art when you have a special child?”

At one point in the mid-‘80s while Cecile was making waves with her Rachmaninoff concerto, Marilou tried it but it was a case of too-much-too-soon. “We have to convince our producers that audiences will be interested in such a film,” says she.

Why would she do it at all?

The parting shot: “Because I am not a frustrated writer, but… I am a frustrated musician and that’s the reason why I am finicky with the music in my films.”

But will the composite lives of Cecile, Lea Salonga, Lisa Macuja-Elizalde, Otoniel Gonzaga, Conchita Gaston and Zeneida Amador make sense to moviegoers of this generation?

With the success of Shine and Hilary & Jackie, Marilou’s dream picture might yet come true.