Creativity Quote by Jacqueline du Pre

For Jacqueline du Pre, “Playing” isn’t a hobby or even a craft; it’s a controlled act of self-erasure. The verb “lifts” matters: it implies weight, gravity, a body that has to be hauled out of ordinary consciousness. Du Pre was famous for performances that felt physically inhabited, as if the cello weren’t an instrument so much as a second vocal tract. This line captures that signature intensity without romanticizing it as serene transcendence. She doesn’t say music makes you “calm” or “whole.” She says it takes you somewhere delirious.

“Delirious” is the tell. It’s not the polite language of concert-hall reverence; it’s the language of fever, intoxication, and surrender. The subtext is that the best playing isn’t fully governed by the rational mind. Technique is assumed, even invisible. What she’s describing is the moment after technique, when the performer stops managing the music and starts getting managed by it. That’s a risky admission in a classical world that prizes control, cleanliness, and tasteful restraint.

Context sharpens the edge. Du Pre’s career was defined by astonishing early success and then brutally curtailed by multiple sclerosis. Read against that biography, “lifts you out of yourself” sounds like both liberation and necessity: playing as a way to outrun the confines of the body, the pressures of celebrity, even the loneliness that comes with being exceptional. It also hints at why audiences couldn’t look away. They weren’t just hearing Dvorak or Elgar; they were watching someone disappear into sound, and calling that disappearance art.