Child Became a Musical Prodigy

I was Director of Music at The Yehudi Menuhin School in England for nineteen years from 1998 – 2017, and worked at the school on and off for forty years, starting as a young composition teacher in 1997. I got to know Menuhin and his family quite well over that period and worked particularly closely with him in the last year of his life. Indeed, after he died early in 1999, I was involved in organizing his funeral. He had written that he would like to be buried by a tree and a river. Honouring his wishes, his family chose to inter him in the school grounds, next to the tree that he planted on his eightieth birthday and not far from the River Mole. My eulogy was performed at the service along with music by Bach and Schubert. Rabbi David Goldberg, then of St John's Wood Liberal Synagogue, officiated and the Kaddish prayer was included in the ritual. The service was clearly Jew-ish, if somewhat unconventional.

In his old age, Menuhin had a reputation of being a calm, meditative, spiritual sage – a man of grace and kindness. At one of the libel trials of the notoriously satirical magazine Private Eye, Richard Ingrams, who was editor at the time, was asked by the judge if there were any public figures that his 'tawdry journal' would not lampoon. After a moment's reflection Ingrams replied, 'Mother Teresa and Yehudi Menuhin'!

However, the Yehudi Menuhin whom I knew was no saint; simply a great and an incredibly hard-working musician who cared passionately about the world – its environment, its societies and its politics. Yehudi was 'green' before the term was invented (he was one of the first people in England to have an electric car) and he was into 'World' and 'Crossover' Music before the terms had been coined – performing with the likes of Ravi Shankar and Stéphane Grappelli.

Photographed, filmed and interviewed almost daily since his early teens, he strode the world stage in a unique manner. He was equally at home talking to royalty and leading politicians as he was with the man in the street or the audience in the concert hall. Beyond all this, he was one of the greatest violinists of his era – of any era – playing with supreme musicality and with an unsurpassed sweetest of tone. He quite simply and directly communicated his profound love of the music to an audience, and the public invariably responded with fervent enthusiasm. The stage was his natural habitat and he was on it, as a violinist, or latterly as a conductor, most days of his life. He was a man of vision - a man of dreams, but also a man with a brilliant mind, full of pragmatism and practical determination.

Menuhin's relationship with the religion of his birth – indeed, with all religions - was a complex one, and, although there are many brilliant books about Menuhin's life and music-making (most notably his own autobiography - Unfinished Journey - and Humphrey Burton's excellent biography) I felt that, as we approached what would have been his hundredth birthday, his Jewish heritage was worthy of re-examination.

It was not by accident that Menuhin's parents called their first child Yehudi – Jew. When his mother was pregnant, the young married couple were about to sign a contract to rent a New York apartment, when the landlord, not realizing their religion, boasted of the pleasantness of the place, saying that no Jews were allowed. Of course, his parents rejected the apartment, looked for somewhere else to live, and vowed that their son would have a name that would always make his ethnic origin clear to one and all.

Yehudi's father, Moshe, was born in Belorussia and his mother, Marutha, came from Yalta. Both families moved to Palestine where the couple first met as children. Both then moved to America independently and came into contact again in their late teens. His father's family, through Yehudi's grandmother, could trace their line back to the great Chassidic Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, and Yehudi always claimed that his mother was of Tartar descent. Moshe and Marutha both worked as Jewish educators, but their progressive and unconventional approach led to difficulties in the orthodox communities of New York. With Yehudi still a babe-in-arms, the family moved to the West Coast, where Moshe eventually got a job running the Hebrew Schools of the Bay Area around San Francisco.

Yehudi and his sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah, grew up in a culturally Jewish, but not observant, household. The children were home-educated, with tutors coming in when necessary. His mother instituted a strict routine of musical practice, academic work and time for play. In his autobiography, Yehudi writes of a golden childhood, but the regime must have been tough, disciplined and very rigorous. The children called their father 'Abba', and their mother 'Imma', and Chassidic songs were part of their daily life. They did not drive on the Sabbath. They did not keep kosher, but the parents did instil a fierce moral code, judging each individual on his or her own merits, whether rich or poor, socially eminent or not.

Yehudi's musical development is well documented. Starting the violin at the age of three, he developed as a child prodigy and was playing a concerto with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra by the age of nine. For the most part, his mother supervised his education and, with his father managing his career, Yehudi became a world 'star' before he was in his teens, performing all over America and Europe, drawing hyperbolic reviews from critics and standing ovations wherever he went. Many of the great violinists of that era came of Jewish-Russian families – the Oishes and the Moishes, as Yehudi once described them - and perhaps this was because of the determination of the archetypal Jewish mother, keen that her son should play his way out of the ghetto and find material wealth.