✦ Origins ✦
British choreographer Cathy Marston created The Cellist for The Royal Ballet, premiering in February 2020 at the Royal Opera House. The work tells the story of Jacqueline du Pré, the British cellist whose meteoric career was cut short by multiple sclerosis, diagnosed in her late twenties, and who died in 1987 at the age of 42. Marston, known for building narrative ballets around real historical figures and literary sources rather than invented stories, approached du Pré's life as a way of examining what it means to lose access to one's own instrument and voice mid-career, a subject with few direct precedents in the narrative ballet repertory.
The score, arranged by Marston's longtime collaborator Philip Feeney, draws on music associated with du Pré's own repertoire, most notably Elgar's Cello Concerto, alongside original composition, building a musical narrator that runs alongside the choreography throughout the ballet. The choice of repertoire tied to du Pré's actual performing career, rather than a generic score, was central to Marston's approach of grounding the ballet as closely as possible in its subject's real artistic identity.
Structure
The work's central device is its casting of a dancer as "The Instrument" — the cello itself given human form, partnering the central Cellist role throughout and embodying the intimate, interdependent relationship between a musician and their instrument. The choreography stages this relationship as a literal pas de deux, with the Instrument lifted, carried, and played by the Cellist even as it also supports and shapes her movement. A parallel relationship with a Conductor figure, evoking du Pré's husband, the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, frames the narrative alongside her illness and eventual loss of the ability to play. Marston builds the ballet's emotional trajectory largely through this triangle of relationships — Cellist, Instrument, and Conductor — using the shifting balance of trust and control between the three to trace du Pré's rise, her artistic partnerships, and eventually the devastating separation from her own instrument that illness imposed on her.
Reception & Legacy
The Cellist won strong critical praise on its premiere, particularly for the Instrument device as a piece of choreographic invention rarely attempted so directly in narrative ballet, and for its handling of disability and loss without sentimentalizing either. It quickly entered regular Royal Ballet repertory and has since been restaged with different casts, and is frequently cited as a rare recent example of a full-length narrative ballet built around the life of a real, named twentieth-century woman artist. It has also been discussed as part of a broader pattern in Marston's choreographic career of building ballets around historical women whose stories had not previously been given full-length treatment, extending a strand of narrative ballet-making distinct from the fairy tales and literary classics that dominate much of the traditional repertory.
The Instrument device also stands as one of the more formally inventive choreographic solutions on this site to a problem many narrative choreographers face — how to stage an internal or abstract relationship, in this case between a musician and her craft, as legible, danced partnering rather than mime.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Cathy Marston.