A four-year-old girl in Oxford heard a cello on the radio in the late 1940s and asked her mother for one of those. This episode follows Jacqueline du Pré from that moment to global fame: the custom illustrated pieces her pianist mother Iris composed for her, the Guilhermina Suggia Award at 11, studies with William Pleeth, and the decision to end her general education at 14 to focus entirely on the cello. Her Wigmore Hall debut came at 16, and at 20 she recorded the Elgar Cello Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli, a performance that became the benchmark against which every subsequent cellist is judged.

We look at her whirlwind relationship with Daniel Barenboim, whom she met on Christmas Eve 1966 and married at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and at the instruments she played, including the 1712 Davidov Strad ...