A Trio of Cellists on Film

Last week, when I mentioned the 1946 film Deception with Bette Davis and music by Korngold, I started to recall other movies in which the cello has a major role. Cello-playing characters abound, most conforming to a view of those who “do music”--especially classical music-- as social outsiders. Then over the weekend a local cable channel broadcast one I didn't know about: Swimfan, a terribly twisted quasi-thriller in which the psychotic and murderously vindictive would-be girlfriend of a high school swim star happens to also play the cello. In a later scene, she does a badly cello-synched rendition of "The Swan" from Saint-Saens’s Carnival of the Animals. This is not what I had in mind.  

 

The classic on-screen social misfit with a significant dose of cello-playing in his background is Woody Allen’s Virgil Starkwell character in the 1969 “mockumentary” Take the Money and Run, also written and directed by Allen. While Virgil can't quite capitalize on the potential of music to help him rise above his enrivonment, his cello-playing is a humorous symbol of his being "different." Remember cellists, as much as seeing a cello get smashed pains us, this is just make-believe.Watch here.

In The Soloist, Jamie Foxx plays Nathaniel Ayers, a disturbed Juilliard dropout living on the streets of Los Angeles until he is befriended by journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) If the damaged string instruments in this 2009 film seem more realistic than in the Woody Allen flick, consider this: The Soloist is based on the true story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (born 1951), who was a scholarship student at the Juilliard School in New York City when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Watch the trailer here.

Another moving true story is that of the brilliant British cellist Jacqueline du Pre (1945-1987), who quickly rose to the top of her profession in the 1960s before multiple sclerosis ended her playing career when she was just 28. It is dramatized in the 1998 film Hilary and Jackie, based on a controversial book by du Pre’s older sister. One of the recurring musical themes in the film is taken from the magnificent Cello Concerto by Edward Elgar, a piece that continues to be more strongly identified with Jacqueline du Pre than with any other cellist. Her intense personal relationship with the work is palpable in this version, conducted by her then-husband, Daniel Barenboim. Watch here.

Some felt that Jacqueline du Pre’s brand of musicmaking was overly-emotional. Conductor Sir John Barbirolli (1899-1970), with whom du Pre made her first recording of the Elgar in 1965, disagreed. He countered that “when you’re young you should have an excess of everything; if you haven’t an excess, what are you going to pare off as the years go by?” For another conductor colleague, du Pre was like "the lightning passage of a comet which, with remarkable intensity– but all too briefly – illuminates our lives." This is how Zubin Mehta recalled her. For a serious documentary on her life and musical personality, try the Christopher Nupen film: see trailer here.