Fiddler Growing Up

(See front cover)*

Sixteen years ago a young bride & groom, students at New York University, were hunting for a place to live in upper Manhattan. The landlady at one rooming-house tried to interest them by saying that she never took in Jews. She said the wrong thing. The alert, bright-eyed little groom was of pure Hebrew stock, born in Russia, educated in Palestine. His bride, also Jewish, said as they walked away: "If we ever have a son let us call him Yehudi [which in Hebrew means "a Jew"], and let him stand or fall on his name."

Yehudi Menuhin is 15. His name is great. Already this season his recitals in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Toronto, have shown that, 'unlike many violin prodigies, his genius advances. This week he faced a supreme test--the Brahms Concerto with Manhattan's Philharmonic-Symphony. The Brahms is not showy music designed to demonstrate a fiddler's virtuosity.f Everyone knows now that Yehudi can play trills and double-stops with an assurance worthy of a Kreisler or a Heifetz. Brahms wrote music for grownups, music that is deeply contemplative and tender, faintly austere. People made frantic efforts to get tickets for the concert, not out of vulgar curiosity, but because they felt he could do it justice.

European orchestras usually refuse to have children soloists but Yehudi has been invited to play with the orchestras in all the great capitals. In Berlin when he was 12 he played in one evening the concertos of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. In the Beethoven he played the Kreisler cadenza which he had learned from a phonograph record. (Most violinists play the Joachim cadenza. Beethoven's own, unworthy of him, was never published.) When he had finished the crowd stood cheering for 20 minutes. After the performance Albert Einstein rushed up to him with tears in his eyes. At the great Augusteo Theatre in Rome this winter 20 windows were broken by the crowds trying to get in. Arturo Toscanini, who has called Menuhin's playing "divine," gave him a little bronze head of himself which Yehudi takes everywhere he goes.

So far nothing has seemed to spoil the boy or make his approach to music commonplace. When he was playing the Brahms Concerto in Minneapolis, he forgot a part of the slow movement. He made no effort to cover his-lapse as most violinists would have done. With perfect poise he stepped up to Conductor Henri Verbrugghen, asked him to start the movement over again.

Menuhin has kept this respect for the Masters. He studies now only from original texts (in German the Ur-texts), works out by himself the composer's own bowings & markings. When a Swiss doctor was about to remove his appendix, he went under ether asking for the Ur-text of Bach. "Bach alone, unedited," he said, "is so perfect, so satisfying. . . ."

Menuhin hates gushing. A lady once rushed up to him, said: "You play just like Paganini." Menuhin asked her if she had ever heard Paganini. He sees few of his press notices. They are being kept for him until he is 20. Yet once when he happened upon a particularly rhapsodic screed his comment was: "But I have no good spiccato. I have no staccato. I play my double-stops out of tune, my vibrato is bad and my trills terrible."

He hates nothing worse than being called a prodigy, says always: "It's not a question of how young I am." Mischa Elman played in a Lord Fauntleroy suit when he was 17. Menuhin demanded long pants this season, had them made by the tailor to the Italian Crown Prince. He demanded an automobile license, too, last spring, got it in California by taking a test on San Francisco's busy Market Street. That automobile license is his most treasured possession. It is the only thing he keeps in his pocket when he gives a recital.

After a recital Menuhin still asks for a strawberry ice-cream soda, but in Manhattan three years ago he wanted to do something different so his father took him to see his birthplace on University Avenue at 181st Street. He saw the nook under the stairs where his baby-carriage used to stand, the rigging on the firescape where his diapers hung, the grocery next door where a loaf of bread was snatched from his mother's hands because she could not pay immediately.

Yehudi (A Jew) Menuhin was nine months old when the family moved to San Francisco and his father started working as a day-laborer in a lumberyard until he proved himself sufficiently well-educated to get a job teaching in a Hebrew school. Moshe Menuhin and his wife liked to go to symphony concerts but there was no one to leave the baby with. One day they decided to take him with them and strangely enough young Yehudi stayed perfectly quiet. Thereafter he attended the concerts regularly, developed a great interest in Louis Persinger who sat in the first violin chair. When he was 3 he asked for a violin and his father bought him a 50-c- toy which he instantly broke to bits because it "didn't sound right."

When Yehudi was four he started studying with Louis Persinger who at the end of two years pronounced him a marvel. Thereupon Banker & Mrs. Sidney M. Ehrman offered to finance the boy's career. Large-hearted patrons usually do more harm than good. They arouse high hopes which are almost never realized.-- But Yehudi was born with great imagination and great concentration, far more important than any amount of boosting. By the time he was seven all San Francisco was talking about him. At ten, a chunky, blond child in velvet knee pants, he played the Beethoven Concerto with the New York Symphony. He amazed everyone who heard him with the purity of his style and the moving way in which his innocence suited the music of Beethoven. From that moment he was taken seriously. In the audience was Banker Henry Goldman who, enraptured, bought a $60,000 Stradivarius. gave it to Yehudi as a birthday present.

Less intelligent parents might have ruined the boy. But the Menuhins were wise enough to know that Yehudi was not ready to be marketed. They allowed him only one public appearance a year until he was nine, then two a year until he was twelve. They have had able tutors for him and his sisters Hepzibah & Yaltah. He is good at mathematics and history. He knows five languages: Hebrew, which he spoke before English, French, German, Italian. He has been kept out of doors so that he could learn to swim and play tennis. Even now he goes to bed at 8:30, practices only three hours a day.

Because he is 15 and has shown himself to be a true artist, Yehudi Menuhin will give an added number of recitals this season--in Montreal next, then Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, Akron, Charlottesville (Va.), Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, Houston. In April he will play in California where he plans to buy a ranch. Already he has been offered 350 engagements for next season. But in accordance with the Menuhin program he must spend the great part of the year in retirement. He will be allowed to accept 24 of his offers.

* Painted by Mark Jnffe from a photograph by David Berns.

/- Because Brahms' Concerto is so lacking in fireworks it had a cool reception at its premiere in Leipzig in 1879. Another reason, according to Critic Olin Downes (Symphonic Broadcasts, Dial, $2.50): While Brahms was conducting the audience was diverted by a widening rift between his waistcoat & trousers. Big, bearlike Brahms had forgotten to fasten his suspenders. --Critic William James Henderson who spe cializes on singing, emphasized this point in the New York Sun last week. Said he: "There are today about 250.000 voice students in the U. S. Of that number there may be a hundred who will ever be able to make more than a bare living from their art, and probably not more than a score who will become generally known. . . . There should be the most rigid examinations and every one who does not conclusively demonstrate the possession of a sound talent should be elimi nated and told to go home and learn some other business. .

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