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----------[ Yehudi Menuhin, 1916-1999 ]|
THE CENTURY'S MOST BELOVED VIOLINIST BROUGHT TO HIS LIFE THE BRILLIANCE HE LOST IN HIS MUSIC.

BY PAUL FESTA

Once described without too much exaggeration as the best-loved individual in the history of the performing arts, Yehudi Menuhin was mourned throughout the world on his death Friday at age 82. A violinist, violist, teacher, conductor, writer, spiritualist and statesman, Menuhin was a celebrated musical prodigy who grew up to be perhaps the single most influential classical instrumentalist since Paderewski led Poland.

But I was surprised to find myself nearly unmoved by the news of this great man's death. By contrast, I recalled that on hearing in 1987 of the death of Menuhin's older contemporary Jascha Heifetz -- who might count as one of history's least loved performing artists -- I threw myself on my bed and wept for an hour. Why no tears for Menuhin?

My own personal history should have endeared me to him, a fellow San Franciscan and Jew with whom I had a passing personal acquaintance during my abortive career as a violinist. Menuhin was very warm to me when I auditioned for him at 15, and he invited me to join his school. A second encounter was less pleasant; he was cranky and uninspiring when he conducted the Juilliard Orchestra eight years later at the Evian Festival. His violin recital at Evian was even more disheartening than his conducting -- he was becoming deaf, and gave a performance so bad it bordered on the surreal. But my normally dismissive classmates and I listened respectfully. This was Menuhin before us, after all, a living legend.

A legend, and yet, within my specialized milieu of violinists, an oddly irrelevant one. As a boy I read his memoir and listened to his records, but rarely did his name come up in conversations with colleagues or teachers. He was never mentioned as a favorite; I was never instructed, as I was about dozens of other concert artists, that I must hear this or that recording, that I should consider how Menuhin played the passage or the piece. Among my peers and pedagogues, Menuhin the legend was inescapable. But as a violinist he was virtually ignored.

The story of Menuhin the violinist is a classic tale of lost innocence, of a sudden and debilitating self-consciousness that ravaged a miraculous gift. Prodigies are common enough in the world of classical music -- history books are crowded with footnotes about forgotten sensations. Menuhin was different. Contemporary accounts of his childhood performances correspond with my impressions of the recordings made in his later youth. He expressed himself with equally extraordinary passion and precision. His technique was flawless; moreover, his musicianship was ravishing. "I played more or less as a bird sings, instinctively, uncalculatingly, unthinkingly," Menuhin wrote about his youth in the 1976 memoir "Unfinished Journey." That he had, as a boy, a thorough understanding of Beethoven set Menuhin apart from the sizable flock of history's preteen virtuosos.

Menuhin's decline came in his fourth decade, when most concert violinists reach the height of their powers. His instincts, which had never failed him, began to do just that, and Menuhin withdrew from the stage to rebuild his technique. "Intuition was no longer to be relied on; the intellect would have to replace it," he wrote. It proved an inadequate replacement.

Young Menuhin played with the sure-footedness of a sleepwalker; the adult Menuhin frequently played with the disoriented stupor of the sleepwalker awakened. Earwitnesses assure me that he had moments in which he matched his childhood genius, but later recordings suggest he was a ghost of his former self.

And yet Menuhin made his mark on the century. As the violinist waned, the man flourished. He founded schools and festivals, conducted orchestras and played jazz, commissioned the important Bartók solo sonata, and became a cultural ambassador between India and the West. He took provocative stands on German-Jewish reconciliation after World War II, on the Soviet Union, on Israel. Knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1965, the American expatriate joined the House of Lords in 1993. It is difficult at best to imagine an interpreter of Mozart and Bartók commanding such influence now. Today, when the United Nations wants a goodwill ambassador, it turns not to Itzhak Perlman or Midori -- each of whom has significant activist or philanthropic credentials -- but to a retired Spice Girl.

My muted reaction to Menuhin's death last week owed something to a feeling of déjà vu: The violinist who really touched my heart had ceased to exist half a century before. Both that violinist and his less able successor do live on in a voluminous discography, the first 15 years of which we can only hope is thoroughly revived with digital reissues. And if Menuhin the man is to be judged by his good works, his reputation for nobility will enjoy what his early artistic genius did not: immortality.
SALON | March 16, 1999

Paul Festa is a frequent contributor to Salon.