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One of the foremost virtuoso violinists of our time, Yehudi Menuhin was more than a musician. He was an idealistic supporter of hundreds of charities and causes.
When the legendary violinist died of a heart attack on March 12, tributes poured in. British Prime Minister Tony Blair called him one of the greatest musicians of his age. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan praised him as a tireless campaigner for world peace, human rights, the environment and the United Nations.
An American by birth, Menuhin lived in Europe for most of his life. He described himself as an internationalist, and in the ’50s, he contended that peace would be achieved only under a single benign world government.
In 1985, he became a British subject. He had been given an honorary knighthood by Britain 19 years earlier. Politics and visions of a utopian future often seemed to he as much on his mind as music making.
A devotee of yoga and health food, Menuhin warned against the dangers of white rice, white bread, refined sugar and red meat, and advocated vegetarianism. He spoke about the dangers of pollution long before ecology was a chic topic. He put forward his own notions of city planning, including a vision of New York City in which all traffic moved underground.
Musically too, his interests ranged widely. He performed and recorded most of the standard classical repertory, including the major contemporary works, and he gave the premiere performances of Bartok’s Unaccompanied Sonata, Bloch’s Suites 1 and 2, Walton’s Violin Sonata and pieces by Georges Enesco, Vaughan Williams, Lennox Berkeley and Paul Ben-Haim.
He also recorded jazz albums with Stephane Grappelli and as an early and eloquent advocate of Eastern music, he made a series of East-meets-West recordings with Indian musicians, including sitarist Ravi Shankar, who wrote Prabhati (Of the Morning, 1966) for him.
“The more variety there is, the more opportunity for seeing a wide range of expression, whether in painting or music or politics, the more we depend on the discipline, the sense of responsibility, the sense of values, the sense of proportion of the population. And one of the great difficulties of our age is that we have a greater freedom than we really deserve or than we can cope with.”
— Yehudi Menuhin
As a classical violinist with a fascination for improvisation (though by his own account with no facility for it), Yehudi Menuhin has thought widely, as shown by the quote above, on the varying demands of freedom and discipline which improvisation and classical performance — and by extension, other forms of human activity — make.
Menuhin was buried on 19 March in London at a private ceremony at the school he established for promising musicians.
The traditional Jewish service at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Stoke D'Abernon, Surrey, in south-west England, was attended by his family, close friends and European royalty. He was laid to rest beneath a tree which he had planted at the school two years ago. Among those present were his widow Lady Menuhin and his children - Zamira, Krov, Gerard and Jeremy.
Others attending were Queen Sofia of Spain, Princess Irene of Greece and Austrian baritone Benno Schollum.
Reuters
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Menuhin was born in New York on April 22, 1916. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants who had met in Palestine in 1909 and married in New York in 1914.
In 1917, the Menuhins moved to San Francisco, where his father, after an unsuccessful attempt at running a farm near Oakland, supported his family by teaching Hebrew.
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Menuhin asked for a violin when he was three, and was taken to Sigmund Anker, a teacher who specialised in very young players. He came to prominence in his childhood as a virtuoso in velvet kneepants and first appeared as solo violinist with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the age of seven.
He later studied with the Romanian violinist-composer Georges Enesco, who deeply influenced his artistic development, and with the German violinist Adolph Busch.
The Menuhins visited Europe in 1927, and there Menuhin played for the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye, who was astonished to discover the extent to which the 11-year-old’s technique was intuitive.
Although he could play difficult works like Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, when Ysaye asked him to play a three-octave arpeggio, Menuhin didn't understand the request.
Menuhin made debuts in Berlin in 1928 and London in 1929, and soon began making recordings. His 1932 recording of the Elgar’s Violin Concerto, with the composer conducting, remains a classic. That same year, he made the first of many recordings with his sister pianist Hephzibah Menuhin.
After several years in Europe, the Menuhins moved back to California in 1934.
Two years later, at age 19, Menuhin experienced his first crisis of confidence. Canceling all his concerts, the young virtuoso came to terms with the fact that his early training had been deficient.
But technique may not have been his only problem. In Yehudi Menuhin: The Story Of The Man And The Musician, a biography written with Menuhin’s cooperation and published in 1955, Robert Magidoff said that Menuhin’s problems were psychological and could be traced to the over-protectiveness of his parents, particularly his mother.
In 1944 he commissioned and gave the first performance of the sonata for solo violin by Bartók, and gave many concerts for soldiers during World War II, accompanied by Benjamin Britten on the piano.
Menuhin toured widely, often with his sister Hephzibah, and later conducted the Bath (later the Menuhin) Festival Orchestra. In 1963 he founded the Menuhin School of Music in Surrey, England.
Menuhin became a respected conductor and an organizer of festivals and schools. When he was at his best, his playing had a grandeur and intensity that made his sound instantly recognizable, both in the concert hall and on disk.
He recorded prolifically, beginning in 1928 when he was 12, and even after he stopped playing the violin publicly in the early ’90s, he continued to perform and make recordings as a conductor.
Menuhin’s first marriage to Nola Ruby Nichols produced a daughter, Zamira, and a son, Krov, and ended in divorce. In 1947, he married dancer Diana Gould. They had two children, Jeremy, who became a concert pianist and often performed with his father, and Gerard.
Menuhin wrote an autobiography, Unfinished Journey (1977). He moved to London in 1959, was knighted in 1965, and became a British subject in 1985. He was created Lord Menuhin in 1993, and is a member of the Order of Merit, Great Britain’s highest honour.
As the years passed, Yehudi Menuhin kept up his enthusiasms, his aura of innocence and his visionary way of engaging the world. As Donal Henahan wrote in a profile of Menuhin for The New York Times: “One still seems to discern, under the mask of the graying adult, the child wonder who made his New York recital debut at age 10 and to whom Einstein himself, a fiddler of famously modest talent, once said: ‘Today you have again proven to me that there is a God in heaven.’”
— NYT, AFP
Keith K. Klassiks is a student from Singapore who enjoys helping people out. He puts his hobbies of music, writing and web publishing to use by reviewing classical pieces for the Vienna Online, besides maintaining his site in Vienna.
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