Some Notes of Inauthenticity

We should, I suppose, be grateful to the British. They’ve just given us a new highly touted feature film about one of the most astonishing musicians of the last 40 years, and it is a film that promises to do for Elgar’s Cello Concerto what “Elvira Madigan” did for Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto, and what “Shine” did for Rachmaninoff’s Third. And they’ve awarded this year’s Booker Prize, their highest and most publicized literary honor, to a novel in large part about a composer writing and premiering a major symphony.

Too bad “Hilary and Jackie,” the new movie about cellist Jacqueline du Pre, and Ian McEwen’s curt little thriller, “Amsterdam,” get it so wrong musically.

“Hilary and Jackie” and “Amsterdam” are certainly musically ambitious. The movie attempts nothing less than to capture the physical force of one of the most charismatic real-life performers of modern times. The novel enters the mind of a fictional composer as he writes his millennium symphony, aimed at representing the century gone by and suggesting the unknowability of the next.

It is hard to accuse these two works of failing, given all the acclaim they are receiving. Clearly they have something to say to eager, intelligent audiences. And it is equally hard not to hope such acclaim means that classical music is continuing to intrigue and compel a general audience.

But, nonetheless, the musical cores of these works are seriously flawed. Emily Watson’s highly praised portrayal of Jacqueline du Pre does in fact capture some of her personal magnetism. She’s gotten many of Du Pre’s movements down: something of the walk and the talk, but those are all superficial characteristics. To really understand Du Pre, and consequently to understand her sexuality and the full tragedy of her developing multiple sclerosis in her late 20s, you need an accurate sense of her cello playing.

All music is made with the body, even if the prevalent tradition of classical music has prudishly avoided that fact. Liszt, Paganini and Mahler were reputed to be the wild exceptions a century ago, and each made a sensation because of it. Similarly, Leonard Bernstein’s flamboyance on the podium, Glenn Gould’s singing and physical mannerisms at the piano, Robert Mann’s hyperkinetic movements as the first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, shocked the staid classical world in the ‘50s. Shocked, even repelled, but also fascinated.

Du Pre, who came of age in the ‘60s and brought a quality of that decade’s abandon to her playing, displayed a physical connection with her cello that I have never seen equaled. She seemed to be playing herself, and she also gave herself up to the music in a sensual way that appeared downright lascivious. She had a transcendental technique that allowed her to develop an elemental union with music. She was not just a sensual performer, she was a sexual one, in the most powerful and profound sense. No doubt she had a fairly needy emotional life--including an unhealthy dependence on her sister, Hilary, and a rocky marriage to conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim--to go along with that.

But this quality of becoming one with the music simply cannot be mimicked by a non-cello-playing, nonmusical actress any more than an actor without at least a good portion of the technique and presence of Nureyev could ever convince us that he was the dancer. Consequently, “Hilary and Jackie” is all smoke and mirrors. It cannot hope to reveal who Du Pre or her friends, relatives and lovers were without an appreciation of how their relationship to music was all-consuming.

Watson looks the amateur with cello in her hand. David Morrissey, who plays Kiffer Finzi, Hilary’s husband and Jackie’s lover, looks the fool conducting without knowing upbeat from down. James Frain’s casting as Barenboim is so dopey that it only adds to the sour impression of this film being the sister’s revenge.

The music, too, is unconvincing. The filmmakers did not have access to Du Pre’s remarkable recordings (which belong to EMI; the film soundtrack is on Sony). Indeed, the only actual playing by Du Pre in the film is an excerpt from a live performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Barenboim conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1970. It was not her best evening, and it seems offered mostly as evidence of Du Pre’s hysteria. The rest of the soundtrack is cellist Caroline Dale attempting to sound like Du Pre--not bad, but not Du Pre--and corny music composed for the film by Barrington Pheloung.

Without a stronger emphasis on the life force in her music making, the fun and exuberance and wondrous appetite for living she displayed, and the extraordinary circle of other young musicians with whom she frolicked, Jackie’s unfettered sexuality and her depressions seem more monstrous and inexplicable than they do even in the one-sided memoir by her sister and brother, on which the film is based.

Sacrificing Reality for Plot Requirements

For Clive Linley, “the thinking man’s Gorecki,” as a young critic calls him in McEwen’s novel, it is not the musical body that is misrepresented but the mind. Clive, a smug, unlikable character, attempts to write a postmodern Beethoven’s Ninth. Up against a deadline, he is desperate to come up with a big tune, the tune of the century, for the Finale. The symphony is about to be rehearsed by the fictional British Symphony Orchestra in Amsterdam before its premiere in Birmingham. The orchestra has spent a small fortune renting the Concertgebouw for the two days of rehearsal.

This is already enough to drive anyone who knows the music business nuts. Why would a British orchestra hire a Dutch hall for rehearsal? Because a plot twist requires Clive to be in Amsterdam.

For inspiration, Clive takes a lakeland trip. There, on a hike, a birdcall gives him the start of his big tune; maybe it was related to the bird that gave Johann Strauss some help with the “Blue Danube” while riding through the Vienna Woods in the 1938 Hollywood movie “The Great Waltz.”

Now step into the mind of Clive, who is set up as a late-century Vaughan Williams, as he finishes his symphony. He works through the night in his study, searching for a small but significant alteration in the big tune that will “prompt insecurity in the listener,” making it “a caution against clinging too tightly to what we knew.” It will gather pace and erupt “into a wave, a racing tsunami of sound reaching an impossible velocity, then rearing up, higher, and when it seem[s] beyond human capability, higher yet, and at last toppling, breaking and crashing vertiginously down to shatter on the hard safe ground of the home key of C minor.”

No composer thinks like that. I can’t imagine that anything like that is on Philip Glass’ mind as he currently completes a commission from the Salzburg Festival for just such a work as the one Clive is attempting--a millennium symphony on the scale of Beethoven’s Ninth. (One might assume that McEwen meant this as some kind of mean-spirited parody were he more convincingly knowledgeable about the music scene.)

Clive, of course, is a fool and headed for his own crashing fall.

But even if this is parody, he is also, after all, supposedly the greatest British composer of his generation, as Du Pre was the greatest British musician of the same generation. Both film and novel may want to explore the relationship between self-absorbed baby boomers and greatness, but they can hardly do so without first an appreciation of exactly what made them great. And neither the sexual sensationalism of “Hilary and Jackie” nor the tightly woven plot of “Amsterdam” can actually face the music.