orn in New York City on April 22, 1916 to Belorussian Jews who had immigrated to the US via Palestine, the boy was given every imaginable means to enable his talent to flower. To enable their son to study under the famous violinist Louis Persinger, Menuhin’s parents moved from San Francisco back to New York.
Persinger then advised them to move to Paris in 1926 so that the young Yehudi could study under Persinger’s former teacher, Eugene Ysaye. But the boy immediately expressed his wish to study under Romanian composer George Enescu – and his wish was granted.
Menuhin later recalled, “What Enescu taught me – by example, not with words – were the notes transformed into a vibrant, living message, the piercing sharpness, the phrases laden with meaning.”
At age 12, he’d received a valuable gift from the banker and arts patron Henry Goldman: a Stradavarius violin built in 1733. Performances with the Berlin Philharmonic under Bruno Walter and the London Symphony under Fritz Busch brought the prodigy in direct contact with the great artists of the day. After conducting a performance with Menuhin as soloist, British composer Edward Elgar remarked, “The way that boy plays my concerto is amazing.” https://www.dw.com/en/violinist-conductor-and-humanist-yehudi-menuhin-100-years-after-his-birth/a-19203002
His brilliance as a performer and conductor was matched by his concern for humanity and, most impressively, his work as an educator.
Yehudi Menuhin was born on 22 April 1916 in New York of Russian Jewish parents but later became a British subject. He first performed at the age of seven when he astonished a San Francisco audience with his virtuosity. His glittering career included numerous recordings and performances under some of the century’s greatest conductors.
While an ambitious mother masterminded his own precocious entrance to the music world at age seven, Yehudi Menuhin took a gentler approach with young people.
In 1963, based on the idea that he had ‘a few ideas that were perhaps valid’, he founded the Yehudi Menuhin School, which counts among its illustrious former-pupils, violinist Nigel Kennedy.
Just as Kennedy popularised the Four Seasons in the 1980s, Yehudi Menuhin has been credited with introducing millions to classical music and for pushing the boundaries of his craft.
Although his interpretations of classical works, such as Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, were received rapturously wherever performed, Menuhin was also eager to ‘escape the frontiers of rigidity and prejudice’ by exploring music from different cultures and styles. In the course of his career Menuhin collaborated with the great sitar star Ravi Shankar, jazz legend Stephane Grappelli and in 1932 recorded with one of Britain’s greatest composers, Sir Edward Elgar.
Menuhin claimed that it was to Elgar that he owed his close affinity to England, where he later settled, becoming a British citizen in 1985. ‘His music and the quality of Englishness he had, that belonging to nature and the lack of brutality was something about his music I loved and I think I owe him and his music my whole close relationship and good understanding of the English character,’ he said.
But arguably his affection for England was cemented by his second marriage, to London-born ballerina Diana Gould. Strong women played a key role in Yehudi Menuhin’s life: his Russian immigrant mother continued to exert an influence over his life until her death in 1996. Menuhin also credited wife Diana as a guiding force. ‘They certainly work for me in a most wonderful way. Whether I attract them or whether I exploit them, it is perfectly true that they were women of great principle, of enormous capacity to endure, to suffer and of a loyalty that is unquestionable.’
The founder of countless festivals, music schools and patron of the arts, Menuhin was made a Lord by his adopted country in 1993 and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1985.
Britain was not the only country to honour Menuhin. The musician was awarded the Lorraine Cross for playing to French troops during the World War II. He also played for survivors of the Belsen concentration camp. After the war, Menuhin, whose first name translate as ‘The Jew’, also showed his capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness by becoming the first Jew to play with the Berlin Philharmonic. Like his hero Beethoven, who said ‘old men should be explorers’, Menuhin remained a committed environmentalist, human rights campaigner and yoga practitioner until the last.
But among these interests, his paramount concern was for the well-being of young people, with whom he said he had a particular affinity because he felt so youthful himself. https://www.menuhinschool.co.uk/school/information/yehudi-menuhin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRHA-Y1441E
Menuhin is geboren in New York in een Litouws-joods Litwak (ליטוואק) gezin. Zijn ouders werden in 1919 Amerikaans staatsburger en wijzigden de familienaam van Mnuchin tot Menuhin.
Menuhin was een leerling van Louis Persinger, Georges Enesco en Adolf Busch. Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog speelde hij voor geallieerde soldaten. Na de bevrijding van het concentratiekamp Bergen-Belsen in april 1945 trad hij samen met componist-pianist (pacifist) Benjamin Britten op voor de bevrijde gevangenen.
In 1947 ging hij samen met dirigent Wilhelm Furtwängler terug naar Duitsland als een daad van verzoening: hij was de eerste joodse musicus die na de Holocaust naar Duitsland ging voor optredens. Na een succesvolle periode waarin hij geroemd werd om zijn romantische en weelderige stijl, kreeg hij lichamelijke en artistieke problemen als gevolg van zijn drukke werkzaamheden tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog en te weinig focus in zijn vroege opleiding. Oefeningen en studie in combinatie met yoga en meditatie hielpen hem om over de meeste problemen heen te komen. In 1952 raakte hij bevriend met de yoga-instructeur B.K.S. Iyengar. Menuhin zorgde ervoor dat Iyengar les in yoga kon geven in onder meer Londen, Zwitserland en Parijs. Voor veel westerlingen was dit de eerste kennismaking met yoga.
In 1962 richtte hij de Yehudi Menuhin school op in Surrey. Ook verzorgde hij rond die tijd het muziekprogramma op de Nueva School in Hillsborough. Bekende leerlingen van hem zijn Nigel Kennedy en de Hongaarse violist Csaba Erdélyi.
Menuhin trad tot op hoge leeftijd op en werd vooral bekend door zijn diepzinnige en toch eenvoudige interpretaties. In de jaren tachtig maakte hij samen met Stéphane Grappelli jazz-opnames. Ook maakte hij opnames van Oosterse muziek met de sitar-speler Ravi Shankar. Yoga bleef Menuhin tot op hoge leeftijd beoefenen.Menuhin met Paulo Coelho (1999)
In 1985 werd hij Brits staatsburger en werd zijn erebenoeming uit de jaren zestig tot ridder opgewaardeerd tot een volwaardige. In 1993 kreeg hij de niet-erfelijke titel Baron.
Vanaf 1992 maakte hij zich dienstbaar als UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. Hij stierf op 12 maart 1999 in Berlijn op 82 jarige leeftijd na een kort ziekbed als gevolg van complicaties van een bronchitis. Hij werd op 19 maart 1999 begraven op het terrein van zijn school in Stoke d’Abernon in Surrey. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_Menuhin
Early life and career
Menuhin with Bruno Walter (1931)
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City to a family of Lithuanian Jews. Through his father Moshe, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist] he was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty. In late 1919, Moshe and his wife Marutha (née Sher) became American citizens, and changed the family name from Mnuchin to Menuhin. Menuhin’s sisters were concert pianist and human rights activist Hephzibah, and pianist, painter and poet Yaltah.
Menuhin’s first violin instruction was at age four by Sigmund Anker (1891–1958); his parents had wanted Louis Persinger to teach him, but Persinger refused. Menuhin displayed exceptional musical talent at an early age. His first public appearance, when he was seven years old, was as solo violinist with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1923. Persinger then agreed to teach him and accompanied him on the piano for his first few solo recordings in 1928–29.
On 12 April 1929 it [the Semperoper] cancelled its advertised programme to make way for a performance by the twelve-year-old Yehudi Menuhin. That night he played the Bach, Beethoven and Brahms violin concertos to an ecstatic audience… The week before, Yehudi had played in Berlin with the Philharmonic under Bruno Walter to an equally rapturous response.[3]
It was said of his Berlin performance: “There steps a fat little blond boy on the podium, and wins at once all hearts as in an irresistibly ludicrous way, like a penguin, he alternately places one foot down, then the other. But wait: you will stop laughing when he puts his bow to the violin to play Bach’s violin concerto in E major no.2.”The city of Basel: place of study under the guidance of Adolf Busch
When the Menuhins moved to Paris, Persinger suggested Menuhin go to Persinger’s old teacher, Belgian virtuoso and pedagogue Eugène Ysaÿe. Menuhin did have one lesson with Ysaÿe, but he disliked Ysaÿe’s teaching method and his advanced age. Instead, he went to Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, under whose tutelage he made recordings with several piano accompanists, including his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Adolf Busch in Basel. He stayed in the Swiss city for a bit more than a year, where he started to take lessons in German and Italian as well.
According to Henry A. Murray, Menuhin wrote:
Actually, I was gazing in my usual state of being half absent in my own world and half in the present. I have usually been able to “retire” in this way. I was also thinking that my life was tied up with the instrument and would I do it justice?— Yehudi Menuhin, personal communication, 31 October 1993
His first concerto recording was made in 1931, Bruch’s G minor, under Sir Landon Ronald in London, the labels calling him “Master Yehudi Menuhin”. In 1932 he recorded Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor for HMV in London, with the composer himself conducting; in 1934, uncut, Paganini’s D major Concerto with Emile Sauret‘s cadenza in Paris under Pierre Monteux. Between 1934 and 1936, he made the first integral recording of Johann Sebastian Bach‘s sonatas and partitas for solo violin, although his Sonata No. 2, in A minor, was not released until all six were transferred to CD.
His interest in the music of Béla Bartók prompted him to commission a work from him – the Sonata for Solo Violin, which, completed in 1943 and first performed by Menuhin in New York in 1944, was the composer’s penultimate work.
World War II musician
He performed for Allied soldiers during World War II and, accompanied on the piano by English composer Benjamin Britten, for the surviving inmates of a number of concentration camps in July 1945 after their liberation in April of the same year, most famously the Bergen-Belsen. He returned to Germany in 1947 to play concerto concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of reconciliation, the first Jewish musician to do so in the wake of the Holocaust, saying to Jewish critics that he wanted to rehabilitate Germany’s music and spirit.
He and Louis Kentner (brother-in-law of his wife, Diana) gave the first performance of William Walton‘s Violin Sonata, in Zürich on 30 September 1949. He continued performing, and conducting (such as Bach orchestral works with the Bath Chamber Orchestra), to an advanced age, including some nonclassical music in his repertory.
World interactions
For Menuhin’s notable students, see List of music students by teacher: K to M § Yehudi Menuhin.
Menuhin credited German philosopher Constantin Brunner with providing him with “a theoretical framework within which I could fit the events and experiences of life”
Following his role as a member of the awards jury at the 1955 Queen Elisabeth Music Competition, Menuhin secured a Rockefeller Foundation grant for the financially strapped Grand Prize winner at the event, Argentine violinist Alberto Lysy. Menuhin made Lysy his only personal student, and the two toured extensively throughout the concert halls of Europe. The young protégé later established the International Menuhin Music Academy (IMMA) in Gstaad, in his honor.
Menuhin made several recordings with the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had been criticized for conducting in Germany during the Nazi era. Menuhin defended Furtwängler, noting that the conductor had helped a number of Jewish musicians to flee Nazi Germany.
In 1957, he founded the Menuhin Festival Gstaad in Gstaad, Switzerland. In 1962, he established the Yehudi Menuhin School in Stoke d’Abernon, Surrey. He also established the music program at The Nueva School in Hillsborough, California, sometime around then. In 1965 he received an honorary knighthood from the British monarchy. In the same year, Australian composer Malcolm Williamson wrote a violin concerto for Menuhin. He performed the concerto many times and recorded it at its premiere at the Bath Festival in 1965. Originally known as the Bath Assembly, the festival was first directed by the impresario Ian Hunter in 1948. After the first year the city tried to run the festival itself, but in 1955 asked Hunter back. In 1959 Hunter invited Menuhin to become artistic director of the festival. Menuhin accepted, and retained the post until 1968.
Menuhin also had a long association with Ravi Shankar, beginning in 1966 with their joint performance at the Bath Festival and the recording of their Grammy Award-winning album West Meets East (1967). During this time, he commissioned composer Alan Hovhaness to write a concerto for violin, sitar, and orchestra to be performed by himself and Shankar. The resulting work, entitled Shambala (c. 1970), with a fully composed violin part and space for improvisation from the sitarist, is the earliest known work for sitar with western symphony orchestra, predating Shankar’s own sitar concertos, but Menuhin and Shankar never recorded it. Menuhin also worked with famous jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli in the 1970s on Jalousie, an album of 1930s classics led by duetting violins backed by the Alan Claire Trio.
In 1975, in his role as president of the International Music Council, he declared October 1 as International Music Day. The first International Music Day, organised by the International Music Council, was held that same year, in accordance with the resolution taken at the 15th IMC General Assembly in Lausanne in 1973.
In 1977, Menuhin and Ian Stoutzker founded the charity Live Music Now, the largest outreach music project in the UK. Live Music Now pays and trains professional musicians to work in the community, bringing the experience to those who rarely get an opportunity to hear or see live music performance. At the Edinburgh Festival Menuhin premiered Priaulx Rainier‘s violin concerto Due Canti e Finale, which he had commissioned Rainier to write. He also commissioned her last work, Wildlife Celebration, which he performed in aid of Gerald Durrell‘s Wildlife Conservation Trust.
In 1983, Menuhin and Robert Masters founded the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists, today one of the world’s leading forums for young talent. Many of its prizewinners have gone on to become prominent violinists, including Tasmin Little, Nikolaj Znaider, Ilya Gringolts, Julia Fischer, Daishin Kashimoto and Ray Chen.
In the 1980s, Menuhin wrote and oversaw the creation of a “Music Guides” series of books; each covered a musical instrument, with one on the human voice. Menuhin wrote some, while others were edited by different authors.
In 1991, Menuhin was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize by the Israeli Government. In the Israeli Knesset he gave an acceptance speech in which he criticised Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank:
This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.
Later career
Stéphane Grappelli (left) with Menuhin in 1976
Menuhin regularly returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, sometimes performing with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. One of the more memorable later performances was of Edward Elgar‘s Violin Concerto, which Menuhin had recorded with the composer in 1932.
On 22 April 1978, along with Stéphane Grappelli, Yehudi played Pick Yourself Up, taken from the Menuhin & Grappelli Play Berlin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers & Hart album as the interval act at the 23rd Eurovision Song Contest for TF1. The performance came direct from the studios of TF1 and not that of the venue (Palais des Congrès), where the contest was being held.
Menuhin hosted the PBS telecast of the gala opening concert of the San Francisco Symphony from Davies Symphony Hall in September 1980.
His recording contract with EMI lasted almost 70 years and is the longest in the history of the music industry. He made his first recording at age 13 in November 1929, and his last in 1999, when he was nearly 83 years old. He recorded over 300 works for EMI, both as a violinist and as a conductor. In 2009 EMI released a 51-CD retrospective of Menuhin’s recording career, titled Yehudi Menuhin: The Great EMI Recordings. In 2016, the Menuhin centenary year, Warner Classics (formerly EMI Classics) issued a milestone collection of 80 CDs entitled The Menuhin Century, curated by his long-time friend and protégé Bruno Monsaingeon, who selected the recordings and sourced rare archival materials to tell Menuhin’s story.
In 1990 Menuhin was the first conductor for the Asian Youth Orchestra which toured around Asia, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong with Julian Lloyd Webber and a group of young talented musicians from all over Asia.
Personal life
Menuhin and author Paulo Coelho in 1999 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
Menuhin was married twice, first to Nola Nicholas, daughter of an Australian industrialist and sister of Hephzibah Menuhin‘s first husband Lindsay Nicholas. They had two children, Krov and Zamira (who married pianist Fou Ts’ong). Following their 1947 divorce he married the British ballerina and actress Diana Gould, whose mother was the pianist Evelyn Suart and stepfather was Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt. The couple had two sons, Gerard, notable as a Holocaust denier and far right activist, and Jeremy, a pianist. A third child died shortly after birth.
The name Yehudi means “Jew” in Hebrew. In an interview republished in October 2004, he recounted to New Internationalist magazine the story of his name:
Obliged to find an apartment of their own, my parents searched the neighbourhood and chose one within walking distance of the park. Showing them out after they had viewed it, the landlady said: “And you’ll be glad to know I don’t take Jews.” Her mistake made clear to her, the antisemitic landlady was renounced, and another apartment found. But her blunder left its mark. Back on the street my mother made a vow. Her unborn baby would have a label proclaiming his race to the world. He would be called “The Jew”.
Menuhin died in Martin Luther Hospital in Berlin, Germany, from complications of bronchitis. Soon after his death, the Royal Academy of Music acquired the Yehudi Menuhin Archive, which includes sheet music marked up for performance, correspondence, news articles and photographs relating to Menuhin, autograph musical manuscripts, and several portraits of Paganini.
Interest in yoga
In 1953, Life published photos of him in various esoteric yoga positions. In 1952, Menuhin was in India, where Nehru, the new nation’s first Prime Minister, introduced him to an influential yogi B. K. S. Iyengar, who was largely unknown outside the country. Menuhin arranged for Iyengar to teach abroad in London, Switzerland, Paris, and elsewhere. He became one of the first prominent yoga masters teaching in the West.
Menuhin also took lessons from Indra Devi, who opened the first yoga studio in the U.S. in Los Angeles in 1948.[17] Both Devi and Iyengar were students of Krishnamacharya, a famous yoga master in India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_Menuhin
It is an image that sticks in the memory. Yehudi Menuhin, one of the greatest 20th century violinists, is upside down in a yoga headstand before a stageful of musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic. As the ensemble plays the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the maestro conducts it with his impeccably shoed feet – a downbeat signalled by opened feet.
The image, taken in 1982, crystallised the Indomania of the American-born Menhuin who would have turned 100 this April 22. For a good part of his life, the violinist, conductor, humanitarian and pacifist was captivated by Indian music and yoga.
In his autobiography Unfinished Journey, Menuhin acknowledged that “Indian music took me by surprise”: “I knew neither its nature nor its richness, but here, if anywhere, I found vindication of my conviction that India was the original source. The two scales of the West, major and minor, with the harmonic minor as variant, the half-dozen ancient Greek modes, were here submerged under modes and scales of (it seemed) inexhaustible variety.”
His first encounters with the East had come early in his life. His teacher, the Romanian violinist-composer George Enescu, had taken a young Menuhin to the Exposition Coloniale in Paris in 1931 to hear the gamelan, the traditional ensemble music of Bali that Enescu was deeply interested in. India first appeared on Menuhin’s horizon around two decades later.
In 1952, the Indian government invited Menuhin to offer a series of concerts in the nation’s principal cities – Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Madras and Calcutta – with the proceeds going to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund. Many of these concerts were performed in cinema halls, such as the Regal and Excelsior in Bombay, and the New Empire in Calcutta.
In Bombay, the concerts included a veritable who’s who of music in India: it had Mehli Mehta (father of conductor Zubin Mehta) as concertmaster. The violins included, in order of mention in the programme, Sebastian Vaz, Adrian de Mello, Mauro Alphonso, Siloo Panthaky, Josic Menzies, Oscar Pereira and Keki Mehta. Among the violas was Terence Fernandes (who, with Vere da Silva, Keki Mehta and George Lester formed the Dorian string quartet, apparently Bombay’s first string quartet). The celli had, in addition to George Lester, Antonio Sequeira, who later taught cello at the Academia da Música (today the Kala Academy) in Goa. Mickey Correa headed the list of clarinets.
Zubin Mehta remembers these concerts in his autobiography The Score of My Life:
“Rehearsals with him [Yehudi Menuhin] were always an education. His good nature and patience with which he tried to explain everything and respond to each musician were wonderful. I witnessed it for the first time when he played with my father in India. Rehearsing and performing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with him was a lesson for the entire orchestra. He was never unduly severe on that occasion. Instead, he allowed the musicians to share in his musical experience, his great knowledge and his musical skill in a perfectly natural way.”
It was during this 1952 visit that Menuhin was introduced to Pandit Ravi Shankar, although the two had met briefly in Paris in 1932. “From the moment we met, we clicked, both as musicians and as human beings,” Shankar, the illustrious sitarist, reminisced decades later. “It was the beginning of not only a very great friendship but a learning and sharing of each other’s work.”
Menuhin and his wife Diana returned to India several times after that, often annually, and “one of the high points” of the trips would be their meetings with Shankar. The two performed at the Bath festival in 1966, and recorded their Grammy Award-winning album West Meets East the following year.
Menuhin even commissioned composer Alan Hovhaness to create a work (Shambala, c. 1970) for violin, sitar and orchestra, with a written part for the violin and room for improvisation for the sitar. Although it is the earliest known work for sitar and orchestra, predating Shankar’s two sitar concertos, Menuhin and Shankar did not record it.
Besides Shankar, Menuhin also collaborated with Carnatic violinist Dr Lakshminarayana Subramaniam, of whom he said: “I find nothing more inspiring than the music making of my very great colleague Subramaniam. Each time I listen to him, I am carried away in wonderment.” Their friendship began in 1986, when Subramaniam was invited to Germany to perform at Menuhin’s 70th birthday celebration.
During the historic 1952 visit, Menuhin befriended BKS Iyengar and developed a great interest in yoga. So impressed was he with Iyengar that he arranged for the yoga guru to teach in several European and American cities, catapulting him into international celebrity.
“As a form of exercise, it appealed to me because musicians who are always on the run need to unwind,” Menhuin wrote. “Unlike swimming, yoga doesn’t have to be done in a special place. It was something I could do anywhere and, most importantly, in a hotel room, safely near to my violin. Unlike tennis, I didn’t need to make arrangements with any other person in order to do it. It was perfect.”
Menuhin’s headstand at the Berlin Philharmonic performance might have been a gimmick, but his belief in the practice of yoga wasn’t. He felt that yoga improved his violin playing, and presented Iyengar with a watch. On its back was the inscription: “To my best violin teacher, BKS Iyengar.” https://scroll.in/article/806878/yehudi-menuhin-birth-centenary-how-india-shaped-the-legendary-violinist