Yehudi Menuhin |

Yehudi Menuhin

In the 30s and 40s, when it came to foreign violinists, the name Menuhin was usually pronounced after the name of Heifetz. It was his worthy rival and, to a large extent, the antipode in terms of creative individuality. Then Menuhin experienced a tragedy, perhaps the most terrible for a musician – an occupational disease of the right hand. Obviously, it was the result of an “overplayed” shoulder joint (Menuhin’s arms are somewhat shorter than the norm, which, however, mainly affected the right, and not the left hand). But despite the fact that sometimes Menuhin hardly lowers the bow onto the strings, hardly brings it to the end, the strength of his generous talent is such that this violinist cannot be heard enough. With Menuhin you hear something that no one else has – he gives each musical phrase unique nuances; any musical creation seems to be illuminated by the rays of its rich nature. Over the years, his art becomes more and more warm and humane, while continuing to remain at the same time “menukhinian” wise.

Menuhin was born and raised in a strange family that combined the sacred customs of ancient Jewry with refined European education. Parents came from Russia – father Moishe Menuhin was a native of Gomel, mother Marut Sher – Yalta. They gave their children names in Hebrew: Yehudi means Jew. Menuhin’s elder sister was named Khevsib. The youngest was named Yalta, apparently in honor of the city in which her mother was born.

For the first time, Menuhin’s parents met not in Russia, but in Palestine, where Moishe, having lost his parents, was brought up by a stern grandfather. Both were proud of belonging to ancient Jewish families.

Soon after the death of his grandfather, Moishe moved to New York, where he studied mathematics and pedagogy at the University and taught at a Jewish school. Maruta also came to New York in 1913. A year later they got married.

On April 22, 1916, their first child was born, a boy whom they named Yehudi. After his birth, the family moved to San Francisco. The Menuhins rented a house on Steiner Street, “one of those pretentious wooden buildings with large windows, ledges, carved scrolls, and a shaggy palm tree in the middle of the front lawn that are as typical of San Francisco as brownstone houses are of New York. It was there, in an atmosphere of comparative material security, that the upbringing of Yehudi Menuhin began. In 1920, Yehudi’s first sister, Khevsiba, was born, and in October 1921, the second, Yalta.

The family lived in isolation, and Yehudi’s early years were spent in the company of adults. This affected his development; traits of seriousness, a tendency to reflection early appeared in the character. He remained closed for the rest of his life. In his upbringing, there was again a lot of unusual things: until the age of 3, he spoke mainly in Hebrew – this language was adopted in the family; then the mother, an exceptionally educated woman, taught her children 5 more languages ​​- German, French, English, Italian and Russian.

Mother was a fine musician. She played the piano and cello and loved music. Menuhin was not yet 2 years old when his parents began to take him with them to concerts of the symphony orchestra. It was not possible to leave him at home, as there was no one to look after the child. The little one behaved quite decently and most often slept peacefully, but at the first sounds he woke up and was very interested in what was being done in the orchestra. The orchestra members knew the baby and were very fond of their unusual listener.

When Menuhin was 5 years old, his aunt bought him a violin and the boy was sent to study with Sigmund Anker. The first steps in mastering the instrument turned out to be very difficult for him, due to the shortened hands. The teacher could not free his left hand from being clamped, and Menuhin could hardly feel the vibration. But when these obstacles in the left hand were overcome and the boy was able to adapt to the peculiarities of the structure of the right hand, he began to make rapid progress. On October 26, 1921, 6 months after the start of classes, he was able to perform in a student concert at the fashionable Fairmont Hotel.

7-year-old Yehudi was transferred from Anker to the accompanist of the symphony orchestra, Louis Persinger, a musician of great culture and an excellent teacher. However, in his studies with Menuhin, Persinger made many mistakes, which ultimately affected the performance of the violinist in a fatal way. Carried away by the boy’s phenomenal data, his rapid progress, he paid little attention to the technical side of the game. Menuhin did not go through a consistent study of technology. Persinger failed to recognize that the physical features of Yehudi’s body, the shortness of his arms, are fraught with serious dangers that did not manifest themselves in childhood, but began to make themselves felt in adulthood.

Menuhin’s parents raised their children unusually harshly. At 5.30 in the morning everyone got up and, after breakfast, worked around the house until 7 o’clock. This was followed by 3-hour music lessons – the sisters sat down at the piano (both became excellent pianists, Khevsiba was his brother’s constant partner), and Yehudi took up the violin. At noon followed by a second breakfast and an hour’s sleep. After that – new music lessons for 2 hours. Then, from 4 to 6 o’clock in the afternoon, rest was provided, and in the evening they started classes in general education disciplines. Yehudi got acquainted early with classical literature and works on philosophy, studied the books of Kant, Hegel, Spinoza. Sundays the family spent outside the city, going on foot for 8 kilometers to the beach.

The boy’s extraordinary talent attracted the attention of local philanthropist Sydney Erman. He advised the Menuhins to go to Paris to give their children a real musical education, and took care of the material. In the autumn of 1926 the family went to Europe. A memorable meeting between Yehudi and Enescu took place in Paris.

The book by Robert Magidov “Yehudi Menuhin” cites the memoirs of the French cellist, professor at the Paris Conservatory Gerard Hecking, who introduced Yehudi to Enescu:

“I want to study with you,” Yehudi said.

– Apparently, there was a mistake, I do not give private lessons, – said Enescu.

“But I have to study with you, please listen to me.

– It’s impossible. I’m leaving on tour by train leaving tomorrow at 6.30:XNUMX am.

I can come an hour early and play while you pack. Can?

Tired Enescu felt something infinitely captivating in this boy, direct, purposeful and at the same time childishly defenseless. He put his hand on Yehudi’s shoulder.

“You won, kid,” Hecking laughed.

– Come at 5.30 to Clichy street, 26. I’ll be there, – Enescu said goodbye.

When Yehudi finished playing around 6 o’clock the next morning, Enescu agreed to start working with him after the end of the concert tour, in 2 months. He told his astonished father that the lessons would be free.

“Yehudi will bring me as much joy as I benefit him.”

The young violinist had long dreamed of studying with Enescu, as he once heard a Romanian violinist, then at the zenith of his fame, at a concert in San Francisco. The relationship that Menuhin developed with Enescu can hardly even be called a teacher-student relationship. Enescu became for him a second father, an attentive teacher, a friend. How many times in subsequent years, when Menuhin became a mature artist, Enescu performed with him in concerts, accompanying on the piano, or playing a double Bach Concerto. Yes, and Menuhin loved his teacher with all the ardor of a noble and pure nature. Separated from Enescu during World War II, Menuhin immediately flew to Bucharest at the first opportunity. He visited the dying Enescu in Paris; the old maestro bequeathed to him his precious violins.

Enescu taught Yehudi not only how to play the instrument, he opened the soul of music to him. Under his leadership, the boy’s talent flourished, spiritually enriched. And it became obvious literally in a year of their communication. Enescu took his student to Romania, where the queen gave them an audience. On his return to Paris, Yehudi performs in two concerts with the Lamouret Orchestra conducted by Paul Parey; in 1927 he went to New York, where he made a sensation with his first concert at Carnegie Hall.

Winthrop Sergent describes the performance as follows: “Many New York music lovers still remember how, in 1927, eleven-year-old Yehudi Menuhin, a plump, fearfully self-confident boy in short pants, socks and an open-necked shirt, walked onto the stage of Carnegie Hall, stood in front of with the New York Symphony Orchestra and performed Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with a perfection that defied any reasonable explanation. The orchestra members cried with delight, and the critics did not hide their confusion.

Next comes world fame. “In Berlin, where he performed violin concertos by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms under the baton of Bruno Walter, the police barely held back the crowd in the street, while the audience gave him a 45-minute standing ovation. Fritz Busch, the conductor of the Dresden Opera, canceled another performance in order to conduct Menuhin’s concerto with the same program. In Rome, in the Augusteo concert hall, a crowd broke two dozen windows in an attempt to get inside; in Vienna, one critic, almost dumbfounded with delight, could only award him with the epithet “amazing”. In 1931 he received first prize at the Paris Conservatoire competition.

Intensive concert performances continued until 1936, when Menuhin suddenly canceled all concerts and retired for a year and a half with his whole family – parents and sisters in a villa bought by that time near Los Gatos, California. He was 19 years old at that time. It was a period when a young man was becoming an adult, and this period was marked by a deep internal crisis that forced Menuhin to make such a strange decision. He explains his seclusion by the need to test himself and to know the essence of the art in which he is engaged. Until now, in his opinion, he played purely intuitively, like a child, without thinking about the laws of performance. Now he decided, to put it aphoristically, to know the violin and to know himself, his body in the game. He admits that all the teachers who taught him as a child gave him excellent artistic development, but did not engage in a truly consistent study of violin technology with him: “Even at the cost of the risk of losing all the golden eggs in the future, I needed to learn how the goose took them down.”

Of course, the state of his apparatus forced Menuhin to take such a risk, because “just like that” out of sheer curiosity, no musician in his position would engage in the study of violin technology, refusing to give concerts. Apparently, already at that time he began to feel some symptoms that alarmed him.

It is interesting that Menuhin approaches the solution of violin problems in a way that, perhaps, no other performer has done before him. Without stopping only at the study of methodological works and manuals, he plunges into psychology, anatomy, physiology and … even into the science of nutrition. He is trying to establish a connection between phenomena and comprehend the impact on the violin playing of the most complex psycho-physiological and biological factors.

However, judging by the artistic results, Menuhin, during his seclusion, was engaged not only in a rationalistic analysis of the laws of violin playing. Obviously, at the same time, the process of spiritual maturation proceeded in him, so natural for the time when a young man turns into a man. In any case, the artist returned to performing enriched with the wisdom of the heart, which from now on becomes the hallmark of his art. Now he seeks to comprehend in music its deep spiritual layers; he is attracted by Bach and Beethoven, but not heroic-civilian, but philosophical, plunging into sorrow and rising from sorrow for the sake of new moral and ethical battles for man and humanity.

Perhaps, in the personality, temperament and art of Menuhin there are features that are usually characteristic of the people of the East. His wisdom in many ways resembles Eastern wisdom, with its tendency to spiritual self-deepening and knowledge of the world through contemplation of the ethical essence of phenomena. The presence of such traits in Menuhin is not surprising, if we recall the atmosphere in which he grew up, the traditions cultivated in the family. And later the East attracted him to itself. After visiting India, he became passionately interested in the teachings of yogis.

From a self-imposed estrangement, Menuhin returned to music in mid-1938. This year was marked by another event – marriage. Yehudi met Nola Nicholas in London at one of his concerts. The funny thing is that the marriage of the brother and both sisters happened at the same time: Khevsiba married Lindsay, a close friend of the Menuhin family, and Yalta married William Styx.

From this marriage, Yehudi had two children: a girl born in 1939 and a boy in 1940. The girl was named Zamira – from the Russian word for “peace” and the Hebrew name for a singing bird; the boy received the name Krov, which was also associated with the Russian word for “blood” and the Hebrew word for “struggle”. The name was given under the impression of the outbreak of war between Germany and England.

The war severely disrupted Menuhin’s life. As a father of two children, he was not subject to conscription, but his conscience as an artist did not allow him to remain an outside observer of military events. During the war, Menuhin gave about 500 concerts “in all military camps from the Aleutian Islands to the Caribbean, and then on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,” writes Winthrop Sergent. At the same time, he played the most serious music in any audience – Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and his fiery art conquered even ordinary soldiers. They send him touching letters full of gratitude. The year 1943 was marked by a great event for Yehudi – he met Bela Bartok in New York. At Menuhin’s request, Bartók wrote the Sonata for solo violin without accompaniment, performed for the first time by the artist in November 1944. But basically these years are devoted to concerts in military units, hospitals.

At the end of 1943, neglecting the danger of traveling across the ocean, he went to England and developed an intensive concert activity here. During the offensive of the allied armies, he literally followed on the heels of the troops, the first of the world’s musicians playing in the liberated Paris, Brussels, Antwerp.

His concert in Antwerp took place when the outskirts of the city were still in the hands of the Germans.

The war is coming to an end. Returning to his homeland, Menuhin again, as in 1936, suddenly refuses to give concerts and takes a break, devoting it, as he did at that time, to revisiting technique. Obviously, anxiety symptoms are on the rise. However, the respite did not last long – only a few weeks. Menuhin manages to quickly and completely establish the executive apparatus. Again, his game strikes with absolute perfection, power, inspiration, fire.

The years 1943-1945 proved to be fraught with discord in Menuhin’s personal life. Constant traveling gradually disrupted his relationship with his wife. Nola and Yehudi were too different in nature. She did not understand and did not forgive him for his passion for art, which seemed to leave no time for the family. For some time they still tried to save their union, but in 1945 they were forced to go for a divorce.

The final impetus for the divorce was apparently Menuhin’s meeting with the English ballerina Diana Gould in September 1944 in London. Hot love flared up on both sides. Diana possessed spiritual qualities that especially appealed to Yehudi. On October 19, 1947, they got married. From this marriage two children were born – Gerald in July 1948 and Jeremiah – three years later.

Shortly after the summer of 1945, Menuhin undertook a tour of the Allied countries, including France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. In England, he met Benjamin Britten and performed with him in one concert. He is captivated by the magnificent sound of the piano under the fingers of Britten who accompanied him. In Bucharest, he finally met Enescu again, and this meeting proved to both how spiritually close they were to each other. In November 1945, Menuhin arrived in the Soviet Union.

The country had just begun to revive from the terrible upheavals of the war; cities were destroyed, food was issued on cards. And yet the artistic life was in full swing. Menuhin was struck by the lively reaction of Muscovites to his concert. “Now I am thinking about how beneficial it is for an artist to communicate with such an audience that I found in Moscow – sensitive, attentive, awakening in the performer a sense of high creative burning and a desire to return to a country where music has entered life so fully and organically. and life of the people … “.

He performed in the Tchaikovsky Hall in one evening 3 concertos – for two violins by I.-S. Bach with David Oistrakh, concertos by Brahms and Beethoven; in the remaining two evenings – Bach’s Sonatas for solo violin, a series of miniatures. Lev Oborin responded with a review, writing that Menuhin is a violinist of a large concert plan. “The main sphere of creativity of this magnificent violinist is works of large forms. He is less close to the style of salon miniatures or purely virtuoso works. Menuhin’s element is large canvases, but he also impeccably executed a number of miniatures.

Oborin’s review is accurate in characterizing Menuhin and correctly notes his violin qualities – a huge finger technique and a sound that is striking in strength and beauty. Yes, at that time his sound was especially powerful. Perhaps this quality of his consisted precisely in the manner of playing with the whole hand, “from the shoulder”, which gave the sound a special richness and density, but with a shortened arm, obviously, caused it to be overstrained. He was inimitable in Bach’s sonatas, and as for the Beethoven concerto, one could hardly hear such a performance in the memory of our generation. Menuhin managed to emphasize the ethical side in it and interpreted it as a monument of pure, sublime classicism.

In December 1945, Menuhin struck up an acquaintance with the famous German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who worked in Germany under the Nazi regime. It would seem that this fact should have repelled Yehudi, which did not happen. On the contrary, in a number of his statements, Menuhin comes to the defense of Furtwängler. In an article specially dedicated to the conductor, he describes how, while living in Nazi Germany, Furtwängler tried to alleviate the plight of Jewish musicians and saved many from reprisal. Furtwängler’s defense provokes sharp attacks on Menuhin. He gets to the center of the debate on the question – can musicians who served the Nazis be justified? The trial, held in 1947, acquitted Furtwängler.

Soon the American military representation in Berlin decided to organize a series of philharmonic concerts under his direction with the participation of prominent American soloists. The first was Menuhin. He gave 3 concerts in Berlin – 2 for the Americans and the British and 1 – open to the German public. Speaking in front of the Germans – that is, recent enemies – provokes sharp condemnation of Menuhin among American and European Jews. His tolerance seems to them a betrayal. How great the hostility towards him was can be judged by the fact that he was not allowed to enter Israel for several years.

Menuhin’s concerts became a kind of national problem in Israel, like the Dreyfus affair. When he finally arrived there in 1950, the crowd at the Tel Aviv airfield greeted him with icy silence, and his hotel room was guarded by armed police who accompanied him around the city. Only the performance of Menuhin, his music, calling for good and the fight against evil, broke this hostility. After a second tour in Israel in 1951-1952, one of the critics wrote: “The game of such an artist as Menuhin can make even an atheist believe in God.”

Menuhin spent February and March 1952 in India, where he met with Jawaharlar Nehru and Eleanor Roosevelt. The country amazed him. He became interested in her philosophy, the study of the theory of yogis.

In the second half of the 50s, a long-accumulating occupational disease began to noticeably reveal itself. However, Menuhin persistently tries to overcome the disease. And wins. Of course, his right arm is not quite right. Before us is rather an example of the victory of the will over the disease, and not a true physical recovery. And yet Menuhin is Menuhin! His high artistic inspiration makes every time and now forget about the right hand, about technique – about everything in the world. And, of course, Galina Barinova is right when, after Menuhin’s tour in 1952 in the USSR, she wrote: “It seems that Menuhin’s inspired ups and downs are inseparable from his spiritual appearance, for only an artist with a subtle and pure soul can penetrate the depths of Beethoven’s work and Mozart”.

Menuhin came to our country with his sister Khevsiba, who is his longtime concert partner. They gave sonata evenings; Yehudi also performed in symphony concerts. In Moscow, he struck up a friendship with the famous Soviet violist Rudolf Barshai, head of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. Menuhin and Barshai, accompanied by this ensemble, performed Mozart’s Symphony Concerto for violin and viola. The program also included a Bach Concerto and a Divertimento in D major by Mozart: “Menuhin has outdone himself; sublime music-making was replete with unique creative finds.

Menuhin’s energy is amazing: he makes long tours, arranges annual music festivals in England and Switzerland, conducts, intends to take up pedagogy.

Winthrop’s article gives a detailed description of Menuhin’s appearance.

“Chunky, red-haired, blue-eyed with a boyish smile and something owlish in his face, he gives the impression of a simple-hearted person and at the same time not without sophistication. He speaks elegant English, carefully chosen words, with an accent that most of his fellow Americans consider British. He never loses his temper or uses harsh language. His attitude to the world around him seems to be a combination of caring courtesy with casual courtesy. Pretty women he calls “pretty ladies,” and addresses them with the restraint of a well-bred man speaking at a meeting. Menuhin’s undeniable detachment from some of the banal aspects of life has led many friends to liken him to the Buddha: indeed, his preoccupation with questions of eternal significance to the detriment of everything temporal and transient predisposes him to extraordinary forgetfulness in vain worldly affairs. Knowing this well, his wife was not surprised when he recently politely asked who Greta Garbo was.

Menuhin’s personal life with his second wife seems to have developed very happily. She mostly accompanies him on trips, and at the beginning of their life together, he simply did not go anywhere without her. Recall that she even gave birth to her first child on the road – at a festival in Edinburgh.

But back to Winthrop’s description: “Like most concert artists, Menuhin, by necessity, leads a hectic life. His English wife calls him “a violin music distributor”. He has his own house – and a very impressive one – nestled in the hills near the town of Los Gatos, a hundred kilometers south of San Francisco, but he rarely spends more than one or two weeks a year in it. His most typical setting is the cabin of an ocean-going steamer or the compartment of a Pullman car, which he occupies during his almost uninterrupted concert tours. When his wife is not with him, he enters the Pullman compartment with a feeling of some kind of awkwardness: it probably seems immodest to him to occupy a seat intended for several passengers alone. But a separate compartment is more convenient for him to perform various physical exercises prescribed by the eastern teachings of yoga, of which he became an adherent several years ago. In his opinion, these exercises are directly related to his health, apparently excellent, and to his state of mind, apparently serene. The program of these exercises includes standing on your head for fifteen or twelve minutes daily, a feat, under any conditions associated with extraordinary muscle coordination, in a swaying train or on a steamboat during a storm, requiring superhuman endurance.

Menuhin’s luggage is striking in its simplicity and, given the length of his many tours, in its scarcity. It consists of two shabby suitcases stuffed with underwear, costumes for performances and work, an invariable volume of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu “The Teachings of the Tao” and a large violin case with two stradivarius worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; he constantly wipes them down with Pullman towels. If he has just left home, he may have a basket of fried chicken and fruit in his luggage; all lovingly wrapped in wax paper by his mother, who lives with her husband, Yehudi’s father, also near Los Gatos. Menuhin does not like dining cars and when the train stops for more or less time in any city, he goes in search of diet food stalls, where he consumes carrot and celery juice in large quantities. If there is anything in the world that interests Menuhin more than playing the violin and lofty ideas, then these are questions of nutrition: firmly convinced that life should be treated as an organic whole, he manages to connect these three elements together in his mind. .

At the end of the characterization, Winthrop dwells on Menuhin’s charity. Pointing out that his income from concerts exceeds $100 a year, he writes that he distributes most of this amount, and this is in addition to charity concerts for the Red Cross, the Jews of Israel, for the victims of German concentration camps, to help the reconstruction work in England, France, Belgium and Holland.

“He often transfers the proceeds from the concert to the pension fund of the orchestra with which he performs. His willingness to serve with his art for almost any charitable purpose earned him the gratitude of people in many parts of the world – and a full box of orders, up to and including the Legion of Honor and the Cross of Lorraine.

Menuhin’s human and creative image is clear. He can be called one of the greatest humanists among the musicians of the bourgeois world. This humanism determines its exceptional significance in the world musical culture of our century.

L. Raaben, 1967