The violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, who has died aged 82, was a figure of international stature and wide appeal known far beyond the usual confines of the classical music world. An astonishing violin prodigy, who influenced generations of string players - and continues to do so through a vast recording legacy - he became a celebrity far beyond the concert platform, his views, sometimes controversial, occasionally quirky, covering anything from Middle East peace to organic food and the state of the environment. He became a sort of mythical figurehead who fascinated the press from his earliest childhood, and would sometimes suffer for his candour, as in the notorious warts-and-all film and biography Menuhin: A Family Portrait (1991) directed by Tony Palmer.
Menuhin was born in New York to Russian parents, newly arrived from Palestine. To stamp their identity on to their first-born (and to make a statement in front of their anti-semitic landlady), their son was called Yehudi, the 'Jew'. The family soon moved to California, beckoned by tales of a land of opportunity, and Yehudi's father, Moshe, resumed his profession of teaching Hebrew.
Yehudi's sister, Hephzibah, was born when he was four (she was a fine pianist and Yehudi's best-loved accompanist; she appeared on many of their recordings, and died from cancer in 1981). Eighteen months later another sister, Yaltah, was born also a pianist, and named after the Crimean port where their mother, Marutha, had her family origins. All three children grew up far removed from the outside world - from their peers and from any sort of rough and tumble. Conventional schooling was rejected in favour of home tutoring - not that this was a soft option since this was a home environment where the learning ethos was an integral part of family life. School would, however, have soon become impossible, with the touring which became part of life with the young virtuoso.
At the age of three, Yehudi heard Louis Persinger, leader of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and demanded a violin of his own - rejecting a toy tin version until he was given the real thing. Displaying prodigious talent, he learned with Persinger, giving his first proper concert, with Persinger at the piano, when he was seven years old.
Before long he transferred to the great pedagogic love of his life, Georges Enesco, the virtuoso Romanian violinist, whom he had first heard play in San Francisco. Yehudi salted away the memory of his playing. With the support of a wealthy lawyer, Sidney Ehrman, the family moved to Paris, where it was intended that Menuhin should study with Eugene Ysae. But the boy pestered Enesco for lessons and the Romanian, an outstanding all-round musician, soon capitulated.
The event which thrust Menuhin into the headlines was his New York debut at the age of 11 at Carnegie Hall, when he played Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the New York Symphony Orchestra (the orchestra's initial doubt was not allayed by Yehudi asking the leader to tune his violin, as he was not strong enough to twist the pegs).
The triumph established his playing credentials. Menuhin gradually built up his repertoire of concertos and began touring in earnest, first in America, and then in Europe. The family put down roots in Switzerland, where Yehudi had lessons with Adolf Busch, to whom he had been introduced by his brother Fritz Busch, the conductor of Menuhin's New York concert and Berlin debut in 1929 (when Albert Einstein remarked, after hearing concertos by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, 'Now I know there is a God in heaven').
In 1932, one of the most famous occasions in musical history took place, with the recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto. This was an initiative prompted by HMV's Fred Gaisberg, who wanted to celebrate the composer's 75th birthday. It remains a recording which has a unique place in the catalogue: a record not just of a 16-year-old's virtuosity, but of Menuhin's precocious, natural, intuitive and spontaneous musicianship combined with the blessing of the composer as conductor at the end of his life.
Menuhin's recordings are many, and encompass chamber and solo repertoire (Bach solo partitas and sonatas) as well as the range of concertos from Bach and Mozart to Beethoven, Bruch, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Lalo. His early recordings, up until his early twenties, are nearly all with Enesco conducting, and include an astonishing range of work - Szymanowski, Bartok, Saint-Saens, Paganini - marked by an intuitive understanding of the music. Much of the chamber music including the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas took place with his sister Hephzibah accompanying. And there has been a long list of recordings with Menuhin conducting, from the Bath Festival Orchestra to the Warsaw Sinfonia and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
This spontaneous musicianship, so evident in Menuhin's early playing years, was also a marked characteristic of his conducting. Players remarked on the lack of conventional technique, but musically he was able to get to the heart of the matter. Menuhin was also a man of great modesty, who would never allow the promotion of self to get in the way of his music-making. During the war, he embarked on an intense round of more than 500 concerts as a contribution to the war effort. One was at Belsen, with Benjamin Britten, three weeks after it was liberated by British troops, and for years afterwards survivors would greet Menuhin and remind him of the event.
The post-war years were a time of crisis in both his professional and personal life. Menuhin's constant searching uncovered corners of vulnerability in a technique mastered so naturally as a child prodigy, while his unhappy first marriage to Nola Nicholas in 1938 (there was a daughter, Zamira, and a son, Krov) ended in divorce. Menuhin married the ballet dancer Diana Gould in 1947, and is survived by her and their sons, Gerard and Jeremy, a pianist. Menuhin took up residence in the UK in 1959 and became a British citizen in 1985. He was ennobled in 1993.
Menuhin also courted controversy internationally after the war, by returning to Germany and appearing as the first Jewish artist to play with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He was much criticised by the Jewish community worldwide, but defended his actions convincingly, seeking, as he put it, to rehabilitate German music and the German spirit. He was a prominent campaigner throughout his life for tolerance and peace sometimes at the expense of his career and popularity siding with the point of view expressed by President Sadat in the Middle East conflict, for instance. He was outspoken in South Africa about apartheid, and, as president of the International Music Council, the music arm of Unesco, he applauded Solzhenitsyn in the USSR to the discomfort of Soviet officialdom.
For Menuhin, one of his proudest achievements was the founding of the Yehudi Menuhin School, his specialist music school in Stoke D'Abernon, Surrey. Young people were a source of great hope to him, and he loved the idea that children who might not have the necessary resources to support exceptional musical talent could receive a good education in a happy environment. He inspired the children with his presence, liking nothing better than to play chamber music with them.
He also inspired composers. The Bartok Solo Sonata (1947) was written for him, as was the Walton Sonata For Violin and Piano. He directed several festivals, including Bath (1958-68) and Gstaad (where he kept a house), and was also known for his collaborations with musicians from different backgrounds, playing jazz with Stephane Grappelli, for instance, or Indian music with the sitar player Ravi Shankar.
Unlike many who continue playing at full throttle well into old age, Menuhin for many years acknowledged that his physical mastery of the violin had declined, but, at his finest, he took his place with Heifetz and Kreisler, Enesco and Ysae, and David Oistrakh. His was always a constant battle against fuelling demand with supply: being able to practise sufficiently to maintain standards, and struggling with a technique which had come so easily as a child. Possibly, this diminished the memory of wonderful artistry, which kept him in the limelight for so many years. But at the height of his powers there were few to touch him, and for many violinists the name of Yehudi Menuhin is synonymous with the violin and violin-playing of the highest technical and musical attainment.
Hugo Cole writes: Menuhin's influence as philosopher, arbitrator and defender of human rights can be traced back to his boyhood. Fred Gaisberg, who supervised many of his early recordings, recalled that even as a child it was Yehudi who settled disputes within the close-knit Menuhin family. In later life, he filled a similar role, both in the musical and political field. In his work for Unesco, on visits to Russia and Israel, in defending Wilhelm Furtwangler and Cassado against charges of involvement with the Nazis, he campaigned boldly for tolerance and moderation.
As a performer, he could enrapture and, on occasion, dismay. Though for his more fanatical admirers he could do no wrong, there were times when he played far below his best, and when his bowing arm in particular was unpredictable and erratic. He himself wrote that 'high as I put the priority of performance, I put higher my fellow man'; his many interests and his notorious reluctance to say 'no' hindered him from maintaining the standards of almost superhuman perfection expected of international virtuosi in the recording age.
At many stages of his career he overworked, giving himself too little time for the recharging processes which were particularly necessary for one of his temperament. But when he was wholly at one with the music, the audience, and his fellow-performers, there was never any doubt that we were in the presence of a truly great artist and interpreter.
No one who heard one of his more inspired performances of the Beethoven Violin Concerto is likely to forget the calmness and sweetness of his playing in upper registers, the majesty and authority with which the huge first movement was projected in a single arc, the spaciousness of the rondo in which both the grotesque and sublime were given their due. In Bach, Brahms, and Bartok he could, in his day, reveal the music's inner meaning with a persuasiveness which few could match.
In latter years, he was more often heard in chamber music, with his family or colleagues, or with students and ex-students from the school he considered his crowning achievement and lasting legacy. But we would be ungrateful if we forgot his own brilliant talents, and the generous and unselfish uses he made of them for the world's benefit.
Yehudi Menuhin (Lord Menuhin of Stoke D'Abernon), musician, born April 22, 1916; died March 12, 1999
Hugo Cole prepared this note before his own death