Yehudi Menuhin: Who Was Yehudi?

Who are trying now for a guess?

Yehudi Menuhin.

LAUGHTER

What does he do?

He's a musician, isn't he?

What's he play?

You know nothing, you.

What does he play?

And you say you want me to bring my...banjo?

LAUGHTER

# There's the name on every tongue... #

Yehudi Menuhin was the 20th-century's greatest violinist.

As famous as any Hollywood star, so famous they wrote songs about him.

# Who's Yehudi

# Who's Yehudi... #

Yehudi's music spoke for him,

but the man behind the violin was harder to know.

# Just who's Yehudi... #

A child prodigy unmatched by any of his contemporaries,

he achieved more by his teens than most artists do in a lifetime.

Endlessly crossing continents and cultures,

he took classical music out of the concert hall,

because he believed that music was for everyone

and had the power to change lives.

# Trying to find out who's Yehudi

# Who's Yehudi

# Who's Yehudi... #

He wanted to give more to the world than just music.

A restless, inquiring soul, he became a tireless figure,

fighting for the humanitarian issues he passionately believed in.

SHE FREESTYLES

But Yehudi's cocooned and curious childhood

marked him emotionally for life.

He was a man of paradox whose intensity of playing was

adored by millions.

But who found it hard to connect to those closest to him.

# Who's Yehudi

# There's Yehudi! #

I was 15 and a student at the Royal College of Music

when Yehudi first saw me play.

Incredibly, he asked me to come and study with him.

Of course, much of what we talked about was music.

We worked through some pieces of Bach and Beethoven,

and I certainly came away a better fiddle player.

But I also came away with the sense that to be a truly great musician,

it's about much more than just music.

SCALES ON VIOLIN

Yehudi Menuhin's performances as a child dazzled both the public

and the classical music world.

I don't think that kind of talent

and that kind of emotional maturity,

is something that many children have.

I just don't think it's normal.

I honestly think it's a God-given gift.

He was so concentrated on that one aspect, that one thing.

Music, violin.

And...that gave him huge confidence.

Even within the rarefied world of child prodigies,

Yehudi's talent was exceptional.

Sometimes, when you hear prodigies, it's technically amazing,

but, understandably, quite naive, musically.

I think what Yehudi had was the sense that you really felt

a personality behind the music.

FRENETIC PLAYING

I think it's the genius of Menuhin, when he was young, that he

could communicate and connect with an audience.

It's definitely Menuhin.

He had his own sound, his own soul, through the music.

COMPLEX MELODY

Yehudi was born in 1916 in New York and raised in California.

His parents, Moshe and Marutha, were Russian-Jewish immigrants.

TRADITIONAL MUSIC

To tell you about Marutha is to remember her with...

shock and awe.

She was the Tiger mother writ magnificently large.

And I think she drove and controlled

and directed Yehudi with a force which he never forgot.

Moshe was a worrier,

and he was probably a very sweet man.

But I saw him as an irritating little man!

Marutha and Yehudi were very alike.

They were both passionate.

Even in looks, they were alike.

His music-loving parents enjoyed classical concerts

in San Francisco, and took their toddler with them.

It was an experience Yehudi never forgot.

I learnt to wait for those moments

when the sweet sound of the violin

floated up to the gallery,

thrilling, caressing and more entrancing than any other.

When Yehudi was about four,

some friend of Marutha's and Moshe's

thought they were doing the right thing by giving him

a tin violin with tin strings.

And when he actually plucked these terrible strings,

he threw it on the floor and stamped on it.

He trampled on it, he jumped on it.

"You cheated me. You fooled me.

"It doesn't play, it doesn't sing." That was the word he used.

He always used the word "sing".

So, the first time in his life we noticed

that he has a wild, violent temperament.

Yehudi parents realised just how serious he was about music,

and when Marutha's mother gave the family 1,000,

half went on a car and the rest on a violin for Yehudi.

It was the start of music taking over Yehudi's life,

and that of his family.

He and his two youngest sisters, Hephizibah and Yaltah,

were educated at home.

And that enabled their parents

to focus on Yehudi's musical development.

Yehudi was doing what he loved doing,

and he did it extraordinarily well.

But, otherwise, got put to bed,

did his lessons, didn't go to school.

I think he probably missed out a lot.

Not having the contact with other children.

Marutha wanted Yehudi to be taught by the best,

and, in San Francisco, that was the leader of the city's

Symphony Orchestra, Louis Persinger.

What he gave me as a musician was insight into music.

Where another teacher would have denied me the great works

until I had attained whatever height was deemed coefficient with depth,

Persinger let his ears be his arbiter.

Yehudi's brilliance, Persinger declared, came from a deep,

mysterious and miraculous well.

Under Persinger's guidance,

Yehudi's progress was phenomenal.

He made his professional debut at the age of seven,

and by ten he was playing in front of audiences of thousands.

VIOLIN SOLO

One moment, little boy.

Next minute, picks up violin and...

an experienced, older man, even,

might come through the music.

So, I would imagine that, for audiences in the 1920s,

this must have been quite startling and quite unusual.

His slide was pretty unique. If you think most violinists,

let's say, in the Jascha Heifetz style,

when they would slide - certainly at the first part of the 20th century -

they would slide into the note. So, for example, they would play...

Something like that. Menuhin would never do that.

He would play from above.

But he would take it sometimes apart so that the slide would become...

And then he would slide up and down,

so you would have a sound that would become something like...

And it would leave a kind of a tail on the notes,

and that gave it, already, a very different expression.

And it became deeply personal.

There was no other violinist, really, that would play like that.

Yehudi's fame spread, and the concert that made him

a national sensation was on November 25th, 1927,

when he made his debut at New York's Carnegie Hall.

Booked to play Mozart, the precocious Yehudi refused.

He wanted to play one of the most challenging concertos in the repertoire.

Not to show off, but because, he said,

he wanted to have fun with the music.

The Beethoven violin concerto is probably the one that most

people would be judged by in terms of their maturity.

It isn't a showy, flashy piece of music at all.

But it demands great musical maturity and expertise.

And, also, a wonderful sound.

Many violinists fear the opening of the Beethoven,

because it just has to be perfect.

VIOLINS PLAY

Dressed by his mother in velvet knickerbockers, the 11-year-old

virtuoso walked out on stage before an expectant audience.

OPENING MUSIC

I would have loved to have been there.

Absolutely loved to have been there.

The music was an expression coming through him to the audience,

and it was one of those magic times.

It launched his career worldwide.

And it was one of those sort of life-changing moments.

I don't think he took the adulation in.

He was just very conscious of having done well enough

to have his delicious bowl of ice cream.

He was a boy!

But he was no ordinary boy.

Hollywood stars like Charlie Chaplin wanted to meet him,

and the Nobel prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein

declared, after hearing him play,

"Now I know there is a God in heaven."

In Europe, Yehudi conquered city after city.

And, in 1929, he came to London.

When Yehudi made his debut here at the Royal Albert Hall,

feverish expectation about the boy wonder was at its height.

At the end of the performance, the audience, having already demanded

multiple encores, rushed towards him on the stage in a great mob,

and firemen had to step in to protect him.

He stood there, smiling, taking it all in his stride,

seemingly oblivious to the pandemonium.

But this really was an unprecedented level of fame

for a classical musician.

He was more like a pop star in his day.

VIOLIN MUSIC

In 1931, Marutha decided to move her entire family to Paris,

so that Yehudi could receive a more sophisticated musical education

in one of the crucibles of European classical music.

When it really came to great decisions, which required strength

of mind and this quality, it was always she who delighted in them.

And she'd start it up one day and say,

"Children, let's go to Europe.

"We must take them there. They must have that other...background.

"They need languages, they need this and the other."

Of course, my father would be taken aback.

"How? Why? What's going to happen to us,

"and what about a job?" And what about this and the other.

She'd always win.

It was certainly a gamble,

and it was in favour of only one person,

which was Yehudi.

But Yehudi wasn't the only talented Menuhin.

His sisters, Hephizibah and Yaltah, were both superb pianists

but neither was encouraged by Marutha.

Yehudi was the focus of their parents' attention.

Yehudi didn't go to school,

and his friends were carefully selected.

It was an unusual childhood,

and I think this contributed

to the fact that, all his life, he was a bit of a man apart.

He was definitely growing up musically but not, perhaps,

as a human being.

He was still massively overprotected at home, for example.

His mother made all the important decisions.

His father was his manager.

And although the entire Menuhin family were dependent upon him,

financially, the 16-year-old Yehudi wasn't even allowed

to cross the road on his own.

I also remember him telling me, when he was still very young, he was kept

in shorts far longer than any young fellow should be kept in shorts.

But not only was he kept in shorts, but his legs were shaved

so as to keep him looking the young Messiah

with the fiddle that the public expected to see.

I don't think Moshe and Marutha

had the worldliness to do otherwise.

Their only answer was to build a cocoon, to isolate...

To isolate this genius to keep it pure.

Not to get distracted,

not to have bad influences.

And that was the way they did it, they built a wall around him.

The barbed wire and the whole thing.

And you had to get a special pass to come in,

and that was the way they dealt with it.

Yehudi had been keen to come to Europe

because he wanted to be taught by

the composer and violinist, George Enescu.

Well, Enescu was Romanian.

He was a fantastic violinist, also a fantastic composer.

He'd go around different countries finding out about

folk music, how it influenced music,

and that would be his inspiration for his music.

For some reason, Menuhin and he, really, really connected.

So, Enescu was his true mentor.

GYPSY VIOLIN MUSIC

Yehudi and Enescu had first met four years earlier in Paris.

That summer, Enescu had invited the whole Menuhin family to Romania.

For Yehudi, it was an unforgettable experience.

Enescu put the whole family up,

and Yehudi played for some gypsies there

and gave a very good bow away to a little boy

that he found

could play the violin so fantastically,

and nobody could say, "You can't give it to him."

So he did.

I think what delighted Yehudi with discovering gypsy music

with Enescu, it wasn't the music,

it was the gypsies that got to Yehudi.

It was this wonderful ability to do as you liked with the instrument.

Yehudi's time in Romania was in sharp contrast

to his strictly-controlled family life.

The spirit of the gypsies would leave a lasting impression.

In 1932, Yehudi travelled to London to meet Sir Edward Elgar,

to record the great composer's violin concerto.

Rehearsals started at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

But Yehudi always remembered it was not the meeting he had expected.

I had started to play at the soloist's entry,

and hadn't even reached the second theme

when Sir Edward stopped us.

He was sure the recording would go beautifully and, meanwhile,

if we would excuse him, he was off to the races.

It was comforting to know he thought me adequate,

although I couldn't quite banish the suspicion that the attraction

of the races thrust all question of my merits into second place.

Days later, they met at the recently opened Abbey Road Studios.

At the recording studio, Elgar was a figure of great dignity,

but without a shred of self-importance.

All was ease and equanimity.

The recording was not only successful but good.

MUSIC BUILDS

If you listen to his recording, it's very, very, very free.

People had complained that it was too passionate,

the way he played, and Elgar said, "No, I like it that way."

There is this passion, this kind of

glowing, burning passion in that piece.

Menuhin's recording of the Elgar remains the gold standard

against which all violinists are judged,

and he was a 16-year-old boy.

He just got it. And Elgar didn't have to say anything.

And, for me, it's an amazing reminder of those extraordinary,

intuitive gifts that he had,

how he just understood what music needed to say.

At 21, Yehudi was, by any measure,

an exceptionally mature musician,

but his sheltered life had given him little opportunity to become a man.

He still lived at home, dominated by his overprotective parents.

Then, along came the Australian heiress, Nola Ruby Nicholas.

Yehudi had never met a woman like Nola.

Certainly, early on in his life, up until his late teens,

it was probably forbidden because Marutha used to vet everybody.

And I think that Nola was shock treatment.

For experiencing the world out there.

I think she was wonderful for him.

She was great fun,

very, very vivacious, a bit of a flirt.

And very pretty.

I think, probably, a large extent was the fact that Yehudi was,

at that stage, ready to...

to get away from the total influence of his parents.

Yehudi married his 19-year-old bride, Nola, in London

and they settled in California.

They had two children, Zamira and Krov.

With his own family to look after, Yehudi was finally growing up,

but he'd still not escaped his parents.

They lived in the guesthouse.

EXPLOSION

On December 7th, 1941, Yehudi was on his way to play in Mexico

when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor

and America entered World War II.

Yehudi wasn't drafted

but he was determined to support the war effort.

He left his young family behind to perform for the troops.

The conflict would change his life forever,

in both good and bad ways.

I remember him going away - a lot.

I remember being in California with my mother.

I didn't know why he was away.

Nobody told me about the war.

LIVELY MUSIC

As far as World War II and Yehudi was concerned,

it connected him with everything that he had not been

connected with prior to that,

which is just about everything.

I think that it just, you know, it was a hard,

total immersion course in reality.

Quiet! Quiet, everybody, please!

There comes a time in everyone's life

when a moment of seriousness is appreciated.

We all feel that moment tonight.

It is my pleasure and privilege to introduce one of the world's

great concert violinists.

Mr Menuhin.

APPLAUSE

I would like to play for you Schubert's Ave Maria.

I can't help believing that some of these GIs

in these smoky nightclubs that were filmed when Yehudi was playing

Ave Maria must have thought, you know, "What the hell?"

"What is this?"

MUSIC: Ave Maria by Schubert

It's a very simple piece of music,

and yet he had this ability to touch people in a time

when there were unbelievable horrors, so maybe it took them

out of that situation they were in, into another place.

But it also, I think, gave them the feeling of hope.

He was playing for troops that quite often were going into battle,

or maybe coming out of it.

And, for the first time in his life, I think that he

really understood what he could give,

what music could do.

Now, I had to please men who had never attended a concert,

whose patience could not be relied on.

In barracks and hospitals, there was no escaping personal relationships.

Thus my war cracked open many inhibitions and helped me

to communicate with others.

In one hospital on the Aleutians,

where half the piano keys were found to be frozen solid,

and the inside of the upright piano filled with beer cans,

the young conscripts responded wholeheartedly to a programme

of unaccompanied Bach,

including the entire G Minor Sonata, and finally the Chaconne.

Probably most of them had never heard of Bach.

The audience was incredibly important to him.

I think that that particular audience, those troops,

gave him an understanding of life, an understanding of humanity.

That he couldn't have got elsewhere.

Yehudi played more than 500 concerts to combat troops worldwide.

Nothing, though, could have prepared him for what he would see at Belsen.

Just months after the camp's liberation, with his friend,

the pacifist composer Benjamin Britten, as his accompanist,

he played for the survivors, determined to do the one thing

he could, console and uplift with the power of music.

In the audience at Belsen that day was Anita Lasker-Wallfisch,

a young cellist who'd survived Auschwitz

by playing in the women's orchestra.

That's a day I shall never forget because, suddenly, there was

an announcement that there's going to be a concert in Belsen.

This was four months after the liberation

and concerts were really very far removed from our normal life.

I knew who Menuhin was.

But I don't think many people, survivors, actually knew.

They were playing under the most impossible circumstances.

As I said there was no silence in the room - ever.

And I'm surprised they didn't just stop playing.

You know, I was very naive.

I thought, "Well, I'm going to hear Menuhin, I'm going to faint."

Such a fantastic thing.

I remember what he was wearing, which was very touching.

He had a green shirt on, a short-sleeved shirt,

and a bit of his underwear was coming out.

It's funny, it's those ridiculous things that I remember.

So, they certainly dressed down for the occasion.

One of the pieces Yehudi chose to play that day was

Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto.

Mendelssohn's music had been banned by the Nazis because he was a Jew.

I mean, we've come from hell and there were two people playing music.

Suddenly, something other than death and smell and disaster.

Yehudi was emotionally shattered by his war.

Throughout, he'd had little contact with his young family.

The fact that he was away a great deal and playing

and so committed to that, I think that that became more

important than his marriage, it became more important than anything.

That was his music, his whole life was seen through the prism of that.

Post-war, Yehudi suffered a crisis.

His marriage to Nola was over.

He later said that this period was without a doubt

the worst of his life.

The most unfocused, the most imprecise,

when he let things drift nearer disaster than at any other time.

And, musically, he was struggling to make the transition

from his instinctive brilliance as a boy

to a more cerebral adult artist.

He started to question everything that he was doing, physically,

with the thing in his hands that had always felt so completely natural.

The fiddle went from being his greatest friend and ally

to being, as he described it, an instrument of torture.

Suddenly, the world's most famous and best-paid violinist felt

he had no idea how to play.

It was torture.

I didn't know the first - I really,

I didn't know the first thing about violin playing.

I just played, and the extraordinary thing is that the tour that

followed and all those years were...

as successful as ever and more so.

But I knew that I didn't have what I wanted,

inside of there supporting me.

Many critics feel that, as a violinist, Menuhin was never

as good again after the war,

but I think that this period, although it was obviously

traumatic, was also something of a spiritual awakening for him.

I think the war made him a better violinist because it made him

a better person.

Who wants to hear an artist of technical perfection

who's got no soul?

I'd far rather someone who was a bit ropey, technically, but who,

in the sheer emotional power of what they're saying, moved me

to my very core. And that's what Menuhin does.

And never more so than in those post-war recordings.

In 1947, Yehudi married again.

Diana Gould, a British ballet dancer,

had a very strong personality

that was a match for Yehudi's mother.

Diana represented a completely new emotional experience for him.

They were both performers.

It's very easy to become involved with somebody who is so like-minded

and also extraordinarily beautiful and graceful,

and they hit it off, obviously, very well.

And so that became the story.

Yehudi's new marriage and his war experiences had changed him.

Now he would be not just a world-class violinist,

but a humanitarian and a champion of social change.

The man who'd often found personal relationships difficult

was opening his heart to the world.

INDIAN-STYLE MUSIC PLAYS

In 1952, Yehudi performed a series of charity concerts

for famine relief

at the invitation of Nehru, India's first Prime Minister.

Once he said to me that of all the trips he'd made,

the trip to India was the most important,

because it quite literally changed his life,

and I think what he meant

was that it changed the way he saw the world.

Yehudi was already a devotee of one Indian export.

He was one of the first Westerners to practise yoga

and used it to help strengthen his violin technique.

In Bombay, he met the man who would become his yoga guru -

BKS Iyengar.

It gives one an extraordinary feeling of wellbeing,

so much so that one doesn't have to talk about it.

Most people have to talk about wellbeing,

but a yoga never really has to talk about it.

It's been, I'm sure, the greatest effort on Mr Iyengar's part to...

-To talk at all.

-To talk at all.

Just as a musician, if you ask what you feel about playing,

he'd rather play you the Chaconne of Bach than talk about it.

-Yes.

-Not that he hasn't thought about it.

-Yes.

-And can you do this?

-No.

I don't think I ever shall do that.

The romantic flavour of the whole India, for my father, seduced him.

He loved the rhythm,

he loved the instruments,

he loved the dancing,

he loved the art.

Indian classical music appealed to him

because he'd never heard anything like it.

He told me that he'd been absolutely shocked,

and he had always liked to be shocked.

I think it changed the way he imagined music could be made.

I remember we went to a concert at Government House,

where we all sat and listened to Indian music for something like...

five or six hours.

And it was completely riveting,

for him especially.

He was right in it.

Yehudi also met an Indian musician

who'd have a profound influence on his musical direction and life.

Ravi Shankar.

HE SINGS A TUNE

HE CONTINUES SINGING THE TUNE

HE PLAYS ALONG

Menuhin was gloriously open-minded

when it came to the music of other cultures.

He found improvising terrifying,

but said, "I always thirsted for abandon. It's the Gypsy in me."

For him, the experience of playing Indian classical music

with Ravi Shankar was nothing short of a revelation,

and I'm going to meet someone who can tell us more.

At that first meeting, what would have happened

when they first sat down together

and said, you know, "Let's jam, let's play"?

I mean, how, as a Western musician,

do you even approach Indian classical music?

Coming from a Western classical perspective,

it can be very difficult to step in to Indian classical music,

because by nature, the way we work is so different.

We don't work from a paper, we don't read our music when we play.

We play from a place, initially, of memorisation,

that then leads to improvisation.

So, first we memorise and we learn the music by ear

through an oral tradition,

and then we start to improvise.

For a Western musician to come and step into that,

it's an entirely different language and mode of thought,

so that wouldn't have been easy.

I think something I noticed about him from the beginning

was his humility.

You know, for someone at that level of mastery of an instrument,

he was such a humble man.

He always seemed to come to life

from a perspective of wanting to learn more

and that there was always more to learn.

And I'm sure it was that aspect of him

that enabled him to be able to come to a new culture with an open mind.

I know you've played with Western violinists before.

I would love to just explore it and see what that feels like.

Yeah, I'd love to.

I played it once ten years ago, so I'd love to try it again.

-Let's see. It's all improvised, right?

-Yeah.

THEY PLAY AN INDIAN-INFLUENCED TUNE

India wasn't the only country where Yehudi found inspiration.

In apartheid South Africa,

he learnt that music could be a force for political change.

TRADITIONAL AFRICAN SINGING

One needs to imagine somewhere like Russia in the Brezhnev years,

a granite land, where almost everything was forbidden

and, of course, where...

the government policy was to build walls between people

all the time and everywhere.

Yehudi toured South Africa twice in the 1950s

and he infuriated the authorities

by visiting black churches and townships

to listen to their music.

He looked to black African music.

He looked to the people who,

despite the fact that they were, as it were, second-class citizens,

seemed far more capable of enjoying themselves,

had far more joie de vivre.

So he looked sideways.

Yehudi always looked sideways,

always wanted what was not on the menu,

and in South Africa, he found it.

Menuhin thought that music helped, because at its best,

it was something which everybody did together, as it were.

A liberating force.

All he was was the medium,

and it was a kind of gentle defiance.

Yehudi was now increasingly reimagining his own role

within music.

He wanted to use his status as a leading world-class figure

to highlight and address social injustice.

And it's hard to overstate how rare this is

in the world of classical music.

He could totally have got away

with living his life of first-class air travel and grand hotels

and rarefied concert halls, but he didn't.

Yehudi moved to Britain with his wife Diana

and their two children, Gerard and Jeremy, in 1960.

London would be his base for the rest of his life.

Now, living thousands of miles away from his parents,

Diana devoted herself to looking after Yehudi's career.

She was like a kind of one-person public relations machine for him.

She was regarded as a bit of a dragon.

She tried to fend off people she disapproved of.

But she did a great deal for him at the same time.

You could argue that he needed to have a very strong woman

to be dependent on.

Hephzibah, Yehudi's adored sister, had moved to London, too.

I think Hephzibah must have been the woman

that he really admired and loved most.

Because she had a depth to her that he shared.

Unlike Yehudi, Hephzibah's musical talent

had not been encouraged by their parents.

But in spite of this, her brilliance had blossomed

and they delighted in playing together.

Hephzibah was Yehudi's favourite recital partner.

Miss Menuhin, when did you first play this piece together?

We played this together about 1934, I think.

Were you the first, in fact, to play it in public or not?

He had played it himself in public and we were probably the next ones.

-Enescu had played it in public, yes.

-Yes.

-Did he hear you play it?

-Yes, yes, he heard us play it.

We practised it by ourselves for quite a long time.

Well, I'm now going to withdraw and let brother and sister play.

MUSIC: Violin Sonata No 3, Op 25 by George Enescu

Hephzibah and Yehudi together were...

There's nothing really quite comparable.

Brother and sister, childhood experiences.

Both great artists

She was very underrated as a pianist. She was a fabulous pianist.

It's just unforgettable, for me.

They were really like, in a sense, like Siamese twins.

They were just together, they were just there.

Yehudi had the chance to explore his diverging musical ideas

when he became artistic director of the Bath Festival.

Curating the festival and conducting its orchestra

gave him a break from the fiddle

and from the lonely life of a solo artist.

It means, to me, working with colleagues,

with the orchestra, which is working with a body.

I mean, it's like...

having a company instead of working alone.

A violinist's life is a solitary one.

A violinist works for himself in seclusion

since he was a little boy or girl.

The temptation is enormous, because it compensates

for a lifetime spent in solitary confinement.

Ravi Shankar was a frequent collaborator at the Bath Festival

and when the two released West Meets East,

it topped the Billboard classical album chart for months.

JUGALBANDI

APPLAUSE

I think the collaboration with Ravi Shankar

really represents so much of what Yehudi stood for.

You know, he believed that all musicians are equal,

that all music is equal,

and that one can learn from other musicians.

That if you're willing and open enough to open your ears,

that you can find a way to communicate across boundaries.

Yehudi's internationalism

led the United Nations to elect him president

of Unesco's International Music Council.

In 1971, he was the keynote speaker

at the council's conference in Soviet Russia.

He used it as a platform to speak out for social justice

and for a fellow musician.

Addressing his audience in Russian,

Yehudi publicly questioned why the celebrated cellist Rostropovich,

persecuted for his support of dissident novelist Solzhenitsyn,

was banned from the conference.

It was unthinkable to Menuhin, as I see it,

that he should not have said exactly,

or close to exactly, what he felt,

in a way which was absolutely inconceivable in those days.

The Soviets ordered a media blackout,

but when Muscovites heard of his speech,

they pressed messages of support into his hands.

He loved upsetting pompous people

and he particularly liked upsetting pompous political people,

and so the two, in a sense, went together.

It was the unstoppable child in him,

as much as the political agitator.

As he grew older, Yehudi reflected on his childhood.

He opened an international school for musically gifted children

where they could live, play and support each other.

He wanted their childhoods to be very different from his own.

Although Yehudi still toured endlessly,

he was a frequent visitor here.

He believed passionately in passing down his knowledge

to those of us of a younger generation.

..The third and fourth bar...

Yehudi didn't have schooling as such,

although he had private tutors,

but he was on his own or with his sisters.

He didn't have that feeling of being in a class

and kicking a football around

and all the things that the school does.

He knew exactly how to be the kindly old gentleman

and to make us all relax,

and all of us at the Yehudi Menuhin School,

we looked forward to his visits hugely

from all sorts of points of view.

THEY PLAY A FAST PIECE

Very good, Nigel.

You didn't have to be so apologetic on the very last note.

You could be...

Because you have every reason to be pleased.

It's going very well, it's coming along very well.

'It's essential that they start young,

'because the young children whom you've seen here

'know exactly what they want to do in life.

'They want to be musicians, they want to be violinists or pianists,

'and they should be given every help in achieving what they want to do.'

Certainly with our students, and when he worked with our students,

he was wanting them to find their own way of making music

and their own way of finding the sound that they wanted,

so he was never prescriptive.

The philosophy of the school from day one

was to be an international institution.

He had this vision of having, you know,

a child from, as was called then, Red China and a child from Taiwan

making music together.

He was both a visionary and incredibly pragmatic.

He made it happen.

Yehudi wanted the power of music to touch everyone.

He established the charity Live Music Now

to bring music into the lives of the disadvantaged and homeless.

The pleasure and challenge of playing to such different audiences

gave him enormous reward.

It's really far better than playing for a traditional concert audience,

because the convention and the obligation of the audience to behave

and to respond in certain ways covers over a multitude of sins -

boredom or whatever it may be.

But here, the response has to be genuine.

It's either there or it isn't there.

Today, Live Music Now enables young professional musicians

to reach people in care homes, hospitals and special needs schools.

# ..If you live the life you please Well, it's all right... #

He really was a person

who wanted to leave the world a better place than he found it,

based upon these experiences during the war,

if only he could take the best young musicians

at the start of their careers,

they would give their services where people were disadvantaged.

And yet within those children was a spirit

that burned alive if it could be illuminated by music.

GUITAR PLAYS

Menuhin was an idealist, but he was also a pragmatist,

and he was a dreamer,

but his belief that music could transform lives,

whoever you are, wherever you come from,

was more than just a dream.

It was real, it's alive, it's happening all around us.

And it's amazing.

# ..Not a trace of doubt in my mind... #

Are you ready?

-# I'm in love... #

-ALL:

-Whoo!

CHILDREN CHEER

MUSIC: Jealousy by Stephane Grappelli

In 1971, the ever curious Yehudi

met a man whose music evoked childhood memories

of the time he'd first encountered the Romanian Gypsies.

Stephane Grappelli's gypsy jazz both thrilled and challenged Yehudi.

I've always loved this instrument.

I like to see it in every kind of situation -

Indian situation, Gypsy and, of course, jazz.

And I like to think that the jazz violin

comes out of a link with the Gypsy world.

He loved the idea of the Gypsies,

because he was a Gypsy,

they were like him.

He was a nomad, he was a gypsy,

and he loved their freedom.

I know that ever since I've played...

I started in the classical way, learning to read music,

but it has always been my dream to...

to have some sort of contact, some physical touch,

with the world of improvisation.

I mean, he wasn't a great improviser.

And I know he'd stay up hours the night before,

almost "practising" the improvisation

of what he was going to play.

When Grappelli went on a riff, when he tore away with the stuff,

he was having a ball.

And that's what Yehudi admired.

He, I think, always felt

that he'd been pushed into a kind of musical straitjacket,

not just as a fiddler, but as a musician,

as Yehudi Menuhin.

He could be no other in the eyes of those who came to hear him.

It refreshes me

and it allows me to go back to my own music which I know

with a new feeling for the meaning of notes and intervals and rhythms.

Yes. Yes.

It's like washing one's eyes

and seeing colours much more brightly than one might otherwise.

Yes.

In public, Yehudi was an eloquent man,

but in private, he struggled to share his emotions.

I wonder if it was only with a violin

that he felt he could truly express himself.

HE PLAYS A STRIKING PIECE

When, in 1981, his beloved sister Hephzibah died after a long illness,

this very private man refused to let his public down.

He did everything possible

to put her in the hands of the right doctors

and paid for everything

and did all of that.

But when she died,

it was like a sort of paralysis, almost.

He didn't even give up a concert.

He was playing somewhere and he went on with that concert

and I think he regretted not having had the courage

to face it.

I think he was very complicated emotionally.

It's partly this unusual childhood he had,

of being a wunderkind,

of being able to express himself through music,

but maybe not through emotions,

so he must have built up some protective shell.

He found himself when he picked up the fiddle

and became Yehudi Menuhin,

that man, that musician, that artist,

whom the world knew.

But he said to me once,

"I don't know who they see when they look at me."

And I think it was a question he was really addressing to himself.

MUSIC: Flight Of The Bumblebee

In his eighth decade,

Yehudi, now Lord Menuhin, was as busy as ever,

performing in Bosnia and post-apartheid South Africa,

and he'd established a violin competition

to attract the world's finest young players.

Music remained at the very heart of everything he did.

-It takes less time with every year.

-That's right.

Sweetheart.

In March 1999,

he was performing in Berlin with Daniel Hope.

Usually, he would send me out to do an encore

and would leave the stage.

And on that evening, he decided to stay on stage.

And I could see him from the side, and I thought, "It's unusual."

I'd never seen him do that.

In all the years, he would never be on stage during the encore.

So I thought I'd play something different as a result.

I'd been listening to many, many of his recordings during that tour,

and I'd come back to a piece which I just loved,

which was the Kaddish, by Maurice Ravel.

And the way that he played that piece was just mind-blowing.

And I thought I would play the piece for him.

Just the solo line of the piece.

And I dedicated it to him.

MUSIC: Kaddish by Maurice Ravel

He listened and then we walked off the stage together.

And he said, "I haven't heard that piece in so many years."

And I said, "Your recording is the one that I always listen to."

He said, "It WAS rather good, wasn't it?"

And I said, "Yes, it really was."

He said, "But you know, on the D string,

"you should play 3-3-2-2, not 2-2-3-3."

I said, "Well, I'll try that,"

as we left the stage, and that was his final concert.

Yehudi fell ill backstage.

Days later, he was admitted to intensive care,

where, on 12th March 1999,

he suffered a massive heart attack.

HE PLAYS A MOURNFUL TUNE

Yehudi grew up on stage.

All his life, he had a deep need to perform.

But he was always much more than a musician.

And that makes him hard to define and hard to get close to.

For me, though, he was the ultimate teacher,

because he was always learning.

He never stopped.

I'd love to have known him more,

I'd love to have known him better.

But then I don't know anybody who did.

That was the great... That was the paradox.

I don't know anybody who knew him, knew Yehudi Menuhin.

I remember him as a light.

As a shining light.

So I think he's still around somehow.