Yehudi Menuhin is the reason I became a violinist. As he used to say, I fell into his lap as a baby of two.
For my parents, life in 1970s South Africa had become intolerable,
marked as it was by that tragedy mingled with farce, so characteristic
of the appalling apartheid regime. We lived in Durban, where my father
co-founded the literary magazine Bolt, publishing poems by
writers of many races. From that moment on, his phone was tapped and my
parents were placed under permanent surveillance. They had no option but
to leave the country, but my father was only offered a so-called exit
permit. This meant you could leave but never return.
My parents settled in London, where very soon their money ran out. We had nowhere to go.
At the eleventh hour, facing a calamity, we had some incredible luck:
an employment agency offered my mother a compelling choice of jobs:
secretary to either the Archbishop of Canterbury or to
the violinist, Yehudi Menuhin. She chose Menuhin, and their association lasted 24 years
until his death.
Our life changed immediately and forever. For the next years, I grew
up in Menuhin’s house in Highgate, London, where my mother would take me
every day to play, while she worked. Menuhin was a wonderfully
spontaneous man. He’d leave his Guarneri del Gesù in an open violin case
on the table, he never put it away. He picked it up and played it,
almost as if he were drinking a glass of water. He once told me: “One
has to play every day. One is like a bird, and can you imagine a bird
saying ‘I’m tired today, I don’t feel like flying’?” The violin was a
part of him. To this day, his sound remains in my ear, so unique and so
fascinatingly beautiful.
Where does one even begin to summarize a unique career spanning
seventy-five years by one of the greatest musicians in history? Perhaps
Menuhin’s debut in 1924 in San Francisco at the age of seven; or his
debut in Berlin in 1929, after which Albert Einstein exclaimed “Now I
know there is a God in heaven!” Or his performance and legendary
recording of the Elgar concerto under the composer’s baton in 1932;
perhaps his visit to the liberated concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen
with the composer Benjamin Britten in 1945; or his highly controversial
decision to return to Germany in 1947 and to perform with Wilhelm
Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic, the first Jewish artist after
the war to do so. Only seven of Menuhin’s 82 years were not spent on the
road.
Early on in my life, I had the chance to study and perform some of
Bartok’s Duos with Menuhin. It was an incredible experience for me, and
an introduction to Bartok’s extraordinary music. Many years later, with
Menuhin in his role as conductor, we performed over 60 concerts around
the world, including almost all of the standard violin concerti, as well
as several contemporary works.
These included Mendelssohn’s early D minor Concerto, which he
famously discovered in 1951, and also many works for two violins, such
as the A minor Double Concerto by Vivaldi.
On 7th March 1999, I played Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto in
Düsseldorf, conducted by Lord Menuhin. It was to be Yehudi’s final
concert. After the Schnittke, Menuhin encouraged me to play an encore. I
spontaneously chose Kaddish, Ravel’s musical version of the
Jewish prayer for the dead. I had grown up on Menuhin’s interpretation
of this work and wanted to dedicate it to him. Menuhin pushed me out
onto the stage and sat amongst the orchestra listening to it. Perhaps it
may have been in some way prophetic. Five days later, he passed away.
There’s hardly a passage in all of these great works where I don’t stop for a minute and think of Menuhin.
Yehudi called himself my “musical grandfather”. Now, in celebration
of what would have been his centenary, my friends and I can finally pay
our respects to this great man, in a manner I feel certain he would have
loved. (Daniel Hope)
