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Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (April 22, 1916 – March 12, 1999) was a violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born a U.S. citizen, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985.
BiographyEarly careerYehudi Menuhin was born in New York City, New York, to Russian Jewish parents from what is now Belarus. His sisters were the concert pianist and human rights worker Hephzibah Menuhin and the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. Through his father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty. Menuhin began violin instruction at age three under violinist Sigmund Anker. He displayed extraordinary talents at an early age. His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923. Menuhin later studied under the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, after which he made several recordings with his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Louis Persinger and Adolf Busch. When a child and an adolescent, his fame was phenomenal. In 1929 he played in Berlin, under Bruno Walter's baton, three concerti by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. Albert Einstein is said to have exclaimed at the end of the concert, "Now I know that there is a God!" World War II musicianYehudi Menuhin performed for allied soldiers during World War II, and went with the composer Benjamin Britten to perform for inmates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after its liberation in April 1945. He returned to Germany in 1947 to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of reconciliation, becoming the first Jewish musician to do so following the Holocaust. He said to critics within the Jewish community that he wanted to rehabilitate Germany's music and spirit. After building early success on richly romantic and tonally opulent performances, he experienced considerable physical and artistic difficulties caused by overwork during World War II as well as unfocused and unstructured early training. Careful practice and study combined with meditation and yoga (the latter he mostly learned from B.K.S. Iyengar) helped him overcome many of these problems. His profound and considered musical interpretations are nearly universally acclaimed. When he finally started recording, he was known for practicing by deconstructing music phrases one note at a time. Menuhin continued to perform to an advanced age, becoming known for profound interpretations of an austere quality, as well as for his explorations of music outside the classical realm. World interactionsMenuhin credited the German-Jewish philosopher Constantin Brunner with providing him with "a theoretical framework within which I could fit the events and experiences of life" (Conversations with Menuhin: 32-34). In 1952, Menuhin met and befriended the influential yogi B.K.S. Iyengar before he had come to prominence outside India. Menuhin arranged for Iyengar to teach abroad in London, Switzerland, Paris and elsewhere. This was the first time that many Westerners had been exposed to yoga. Menuhin made several recordings with the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had been criticized for conducting in Germany during the Nazi era. Menuhin defended Furtwangler, noting that the conductor had helped a number of Jewish musicians to flee Nazi Germany. 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. In the same year, Australian composer Malcolm Williamson wrote a concerto for Menuhin. A deeply spiritual and profoundly moving work, he performed the concerto many times and recorded it at its première at the Bath Festival in 1965. In 1983 he founded together with Robert Masters the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists. Now one of the world's leading competition for young violinists many of its prize winners have gone on to become some of today’s most exciting violinists. Among them are Tasmin Little, Nikolaj Znaider, Ilya Gringolts, Julia Fischer, Daishin Kashimoto and Lara St. John. In 1997 Yehudi, along with Ian Stoutzker founded the charity Live Music Now, the largest outreach music project in the UK. LMN pays and trains professional musicians to work in the community bringing joy and comfort to those who rarely get an opportunity to hear or see live music performance. Menuhin's pupils included Nigel Kennedy, Hungarian violist Csaba Erdelyi and violist Paul Coletti. Arguably the most famous of Menuhin's violins is the Lord Wilton Guarneri del Gesù made in 1742. In the 1980s Menuhin wrote and oversaw the creation of a "Music Guides" series of books; each covered musical instruments with one on the human voice. Menuhin wrote some whilst others were edited by different authors. Later careerMenuhin 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 the violin concerto of Sir Edward Elgar, which Menuhin had recorded with the composer for HMV in London 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) from where the contest was held. He also hosted the PBS telecast of the gala opening concert of the orchestra from Davies Symphony Hall in September 1980. During the 1970s, '80s and '90s, he made jazz recordings with Stéphane Grappelli, classical recordings with L. Subramaniam and albums of Eastern music with the great sitarist Ravi Shankar. In 1983 he founded the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists in Folkestone, Kent. 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 at age 82. In total he recorded over 300 works for EMI, both as a violinist and as a conductor. In 1990 he 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 lifeYehudi Menuhin was married twice. He first married Nola Nicholas, daughter of an Australian industrialist, and sister of Hephzibah Menuhin's first husband Lindsay Nicholas. They had two children, Krov and Zamira. Following their divorce, he married the British ballerina and actress Diana Gould, with whom he had two sons, Gerard and Jeremy, a pianist. The name Yehudi means 'Jew' in Hebrew. In an interview published in October 2004, he recounted to New Internationalist magazine the story of his name: In fact his name is just a variation of the name Yehudah, a name given by Jacob and is one of the tribes of Israel - it means Thanks to God - Ya'hudah. Ivri is the hebrew word for Jew - Ivrit the language, e.g. hebrew
In November 2005 his son Gerard was forced to resign from his post as chairman of the Yehudi-Menuhin-Stiftung for criticizing the exploitation of Holocaust expressing his opinion that "Germany was being blackmailed by an international Jewish conspiracy preying on the country’s war guilt".[2] Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish professor in politics, has written on the subject in his book The Holocaust Industry. A picture of Menuhin as a child is sometimes used as part of a Thematic Apperception Test.[3] Lord Menuhin died in Berlin, Germany following a brief illness, from complications of bronchitis. Soon after his death, the Royal Academy of Music acquired the Yehudi Menuhin Archive, one of the most comprehensive collections ever assembled by an individual musician. Awards and Honours
Cultural ReferencesThe catchphrase "Who's Yehoodi?" popular in the 1930s and 1940s was inspired by Menuhin's guest appearance on a radio show, where Jerry Colonna turned "Yehoodi" into a widely recognized slang term for a mysteriously absent person. It eventually lost all of its original connection with Menuhin. Yehudi Menuhin was also 'meant' to appear on The Morecambe and Wise Show but couldn't as he was 'opening at the Argyl Theatre, Birkenhead in 'Old King Cole'. He was instead replaced by Eric Morecambe in a famous sketch featuring the conductor Andre Previn[5] Yehudi Menuhin was referenced in an episode of the US television series Sports Night. The episode, “Celebrities”, featured an after hours game of Celebrities among the Sports Night staff. Dan Rydell, one of the fictional show’s co-anchors, gave clues to his teammates in a game of Celebrities, trying to get them to guess the name Yehudi Menuhin. He had shown his co-anchor, Casey McCall, a secret hand gesture that would clue him in to say “Yehudi Menuhin”, but during the game, Casey forgot the secret signal, and couldn't recall Menuhin's name. Bibliography
Menuhin was also mentioned a number of times in Pat Conroy's novel The Prince of Tides. Films
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External links
Categories: 1916 births | 1999 deaths | American classical violinists | American jazz violinists | American conductors | American vegetarians | American autobiographers | English classical violinists | English jazz violinists | English conductors | English Jews | Grammy Award winners | Jewish American artists | Jewish classical musicians | Kennedy Center honorees | Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire | Life peers | Naturalised citizens of Switzerland | Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom | People from Highgate | People from New York City | Picasso Medalists | Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists CommentsNo comments have been added. |
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