Daniel Barenboim on Jacqueline Du Pre

Whatever I showed her, or whatever she heard, seemed to bring out something that was already in her. She had a horror of anything that was fake, or insincere, of anything artificial. She had a gift very few performers have, the gift of making you feel that she was actually composing the music as she was playing. She did not know what it was to have technical difficulties, nor what it meant to play safe. There was a sensation of pure abandon when she played and it was that quality that endeared her to her colleagues and to her audience. There was something in her playing that was completely and inevitably right – as far as tempo and dynamics were concerned. She played with a great deal of rubato, with great freedom, but it was so convincing that you felt like a mere mortal faced with somebody who possessed some kind of ethereal dimension.