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 Menuhin in 1937 Signature of Yehudi Menuhin Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM KBE (22 April 1916 – 12 March 1999) was an American-born violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in Britain. He is widely considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century. Contents  [hide]  1 Early life and career 2 World War II musician 3 World interactions 4 Later career 5 Personal life 5.1 Interest in yoga 6 Violins 7 Awards, and honours 8 Cultural references 9 Bibliography 10 Films 11 References 12 External links Early life and career[edit] Menuhin with Bruno Walter (1931) Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City to a family of Belorussian Jews. Through his father Moshe, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist,[1] he was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty. In late 1919 Moshe and his wife Marutha (née Sher) became American citizens, and changed the family name from Mnuchin to Menuhin.[2] Menuhin's sisters were concert pianist and human rights activist Hephzibah, and pianist, painter and poet Yaltah. Menuhin's first violin instruction was at age four by Sigmund Anker (1891–1958);[3] his parents had wanted Louis Persinger to teach him, but Persinger initially refused.[4] Menuhin displayed exceptional talent at an early age. His first public appearance, when he was seven years old, was as solo violinist with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1923. Persinger then agreed to teach him and accompanied him on the piano for his first few solo recordings in 1928–29. When the Menuhins moved to Paris, Persinger suggested Menuhin go to Persinger's old teacher, Belgian virtuoso and pedagogue Eugène Ysa e. Menuhin did have one lesson with Ysa e, but he disliked Ysa e's teaching method and his advanced age.[4] Instead, he went to the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, under whose tutelage he made recordings with several piano accompanists, including his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Adolf Busch. In 1929 he played in Berlin, under Bruno Walter's baton, three concerti by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. According to Henry A. Murray, Menuhin wrote: Actually, I was gazing in my usual state of being half absent in my own world and half in the present. I have usually been able to "retire" in this way. I was also thinking that my life was tied up with the instrument and would I do it justice? — Yehudi Menuhin, personal communication, 31 October 1993[5] His first concerto recording was made in 1931, Bruch's G minor, under Sir Landon Ronald in London, the labels calling him "Master Yehudi Menuhin". In 1932 he recorded Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto in B minor for HMV in London, with the composer himself conducting; in 1934, uncut, Paganini's D major Concerto with Emile Sauret's cadenza in Paris under Pierre Monteux. Between 1934 and 1936, he made the first integral recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin, although his Sonata No. 2, in A minor, was not released until all six were transferred to CD. His interest in the music of Béla Bartók prompted him to commission a work from him – the Sonata for Solo Violin, which, completed in 1943 and first performed by Menuhin in New York in 1944, was the composer's penultimate work. World War II musician[edit] Menuhin in 1943 He performed for Allied soldiers during World War II and, accompanied on the piano by English composer Benjamin Britten, for the surviving inmates of a number of concentration camps in July 1945 after their liberation in April of the same year, most famously the Bergen-Belsen. He returned to Germany in 1947 to play concerto concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler as an act of reconciliation, the first Jewish musician to do so in the wake of the Holocaust, saying to Jewish critics that he wanted to rehabilitate Germany's music and spirit. He and Louis Kentner (brother-in-law of his wife, Diana) gave the first performance of William Walton's Violin Sonata, in Zürich on 30 September 1949. He continued performing, and conducting (such as Bach orchestral works with the Bath Chamber Orchestra), to an advanced age, including some nonclassical music in his repertory. World interactions[edit] For Menuhin's notable students, see List of music students by teacher: K to M § Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin credited German philosopher Constantin Brunner with providing him with "a theoretical framework within which I could fit the events and experiences of life".[6] Following his role as a member of the awards jury at the 1955 Queen Elisabeth Music Competition, Menuhin secured a Rockefeller Foundation grant for the financially strapped Grand Prize winner at the event, Argentine violinist Alberto Lysy. Menuhin made Lysy his only personal student, and the two toured extensively throughout the concert halls of Europe. The young protégé later established the International Menuhin Music Academy in Gstaad, in his honor.[7] Menuhin made several recordings with the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had been criticized for conducting in Germany during the Nazi era. Menuhin defended Furtwängler, noting that the conductor had helped a number of Jewish musicians to flee Nazi Germany. In 1957, he founded the Menuhin Festival Gstaad in Gstaad, Switzerland. In 1962, he established the Yehudi Menuhin School in Stoke d'Abernon, Surrey. He also established the music program at The Nueva School in Hillsborough, California, sometime around then. In 1965 he received an honorary knighthood from the British monarchy. In the same year, Australian composer Malcolm Williamson wrote a violin concerto for Menuhin. He performed the concerto many times and recorded it at its premiere at the Bath Festival in 1965. Originally known as the Bath Assembly,[8] the festival was first directed by the impresario Ian Hunter in 1948. After the first year the city tried to run the festival itself, but in 1955 asked Hunter back. In 1959 Hunter invited Menuhin to become artistic director of the festival. Menuhin accepted, and retained the post until 1968.[9] At the Edinburgh Festival in 1957 Menuhin premiered Priaulx Rainier's violin concerto Due Canti e Finale, which he had commissioned Rainier to write. He also commissioned her last work, Wildlife Celebration, which he performed in aid of Gerald Durrell's Wildlife Conservation Trust. Menuhin also had a long association with Ravi Shankar, beginning in 1966 with their joint performance at the Bath Festival and the recording of their Grammy Award-winning album West Meets East (1967). During this time, he commissioned composer Alan Hovhaness to write a concerto for violin, sitar, and orchestra to be performed by himself and Shankar. The resulting work, entitled Shambala (c. 1970), with a fully composed violin part and space for improvisation from the sitarist, is the earliest known work for sitar with western symphony orchestra, predating Shankar's own sitar concertos, but Menuhin and Shankar never recorded it. Menuhin also worked with famous jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli in the 1970s on Jalousie, an album of 1930s classics led by duetting violins backed by the Alan Claire Trio. In 1977 Menuhin and Ian Stoutzker founded the charity Live Music Now, the largest outreach music project in the UK. Live Music Now pays and trains professional musicians to work in the community, bringing the experience to those who rarely get an opportunity to hear or see live music performance. In 1983 Menuhin and Robert Masters founded the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists, today one of the world's leading forums for young talent. Many of its prizewinners have gone on to become prominent violinists, including Tasmin Little, Nikolaj Znaider, Ilya Gringolts, Julia Fischer, Daishin Kashimoto and Ray Chen. In the 1980s Menuhin wrote and oversaw the creation of a "Music Guides" series of books; each covered a musical instrument, with one on the human voice. Menuhin wrote some, while others were edited by different authors. In 1991 Menuhin was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize by the Israeli Government. In the Israeli Knesset he gave an acceptance speech in which he criticised Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank: This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.[10] Later career[edit] Menuhin with Stéphane Grappelli in 1976 Menuhin regularly returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, sometimes performing with the San Francisco SymphonyOrchestra. One of the more memorable later performances was of Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto, which Menuhin had recorded with the composer in 1932. On 22 April 1978, along with Stéphane Grappelli, Yehudi played Pick Yourself Up, taken from the Menuhin & Grappelli Play Berlin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers & Hart album as the interval act at the 23rd Eurovision Song Contest for TF1. The performance came direct from the studios of TF1 and not that of the venue (Palais des Congrès), where the contest was being held. Menuhin hosted the PBS telecast of the gala opening concert of the San Francisco Symphony from Davies Symphony Hall in September 1980. His recording contract with EMI lasted almost 70 years and is the longest in the history of the music industry. He made his first recording at age 13 in November 1929, and his last in 1999, when he was nearly 83 years old. He recorded over 300 works for EMI, both as a violinist and as a conductor. In 2009 EMI released a 51-CD retrospective of Menuhin's recording career, titled Yehudi Menuhin: The Great EMI Recordings. In 2016, the Menuhin centenary year, Warner Classics (formerly EMI Classics) issued a milestone collection of 80 CDs entitled The Menuhin Century, curated by his long-time friend and protégé Bruno Monsaingeon, who selected the recordings and sourced rare archival materials to tell Menuhin's story. In 1990 Menuhin was the first conductor for the Asian Youth Orchestra which toured around Asia, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong with Julian Lloyd Webber and a group of young talented musicians from all over Asia. Personal life[edit] Menuhin and author Paulo Coelhoin 1999 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Menuhin was married twice, first to Nola Nicholas, daughter of an Australian industrialist and sister of Hephzibah Menuhin's first husband Lindsay Nicholas. They had two children, Krov and Zamira (who married pianist Fou Ts'ong). Following their 1947 divorce he married the British ballerina and actress Diana Gould, whose mother was the pianist Evelyn Suartand stepfather was Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt. The couple had two sons, Gerard and Jeremy, a pianist. A third child died shortly after birth. The name Yehudi means "Jew" in Hebrew. In an interview republished in October 2004, he recounted to New Internationalistmagazine the story of his name: Obliged to find an apartment of their own, my parents searched the neighbourhood and chose one within walking distance of the park. Showing them out after they had viewed it, the landlady said: "And you'll be glad to know I don't take Jews." Her mistake made clear to her, the antisemitic landlady was renounced, and another apartment found. But her blunder left its mark. Back on the street my mother made a vow. Her unborn baby would have a label proclaiming his race to the world. He would be called "The Jew".[11] Menuhin died in Martin Luther Hospital,[12] Berlin, Germany, from complications of bronchitis. Soon after his death, the Royal Academy of Music acquired the Yehudi Menuhin Archive, which includes sheet music marked up for performance, correspondence, news articles and photographs relating to Menuhin, autograph musical manuscripts, and several portraits of Paganini.[13] Interest in yoga[edit] Some have considered Menuhin as an important early populariser of yoga in the West. In 1953, Life published photos of him in various esoteric yoga positions.[14] In 1952, Menuhin was in India, where Nehru, the new nation's first Prime Minister, introduced him to an influential yogi B. K. S. Iyengar, then largely unknown outside the country.[14] Menuhin arranged for Iyengar to teach abroad in London, Switzerland, Paris and elsewhere. He became one of the first prominent yoga masters teaching in the West. Menuhin also took lessons from Indra Devi, who opened up the first yoga studio in the US in Los Angeles in 1948.[15] Both Devi and Iyengar were students of Krishnamacharya, famous yoga master in India. Violins[edit] Menuhin used a number of famous violins, arguably the most renown of which is the Lord Wilton Guarnerius 1742. Others included the Giovanni Bussetto 1680, Giovanni Grancino 1695, Guarneri filius Andrea 1703, Soil Stradivarius, Prince Khevenhüller 1733 Stradivari, and Guarneri del Gesù 1739. Awards, and honours[edit] Freedom of the City (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1965) Received the Order of the British Empire in 1965. At the time of his appointment, he was an American citizen. As a result, his knighthood was honorary and he was not entitled to use the style 'Sir'. He became The Right Honourable The Lord Menuhin OM KBE in 1993.[16] The Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding (1968).[17] Became President of Trinity College of Music (now Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), 1970[18] The Léonie Sonning Music Prize (Denmark, 1972) Nominated as president of the Elgar Society (1983) The Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (1984) The Kennedy Center Honors (1986) Appointed a member of the Order of Merit (1987)[19] His recording of Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor with Julian Lloyd Webber won the 1987 BRIT Award for Best British Classical Recording (BBC Music Magazine named this recording "the finest version ever recorded"). The Glenn Gould Prize (1990), in recognition of his lifetime of contributions Wolf Prize in Arts (1991) Ambassador of Goodwill (UNESCO, 1992) On 19 July 1993 Menuhin was made a life peer, as Baron Menuhin, of Stoke d'Abernon in the County of Surrey.[20][21] Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship the highest honour conferred by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy for Music, Dance and Drama (1994)[22] The Konex Decoration (Konex Foundation, Argentina, 1994) The Otto Hahn Peace Medal in Gold of the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin (1997) Honorary Doctorates from 20 universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the University of Bath (1969).[23] The room in which concerts and performances are held at the European Parliament in Brussels is named the "Yehudi Menuhin Space". Menuhin was honored as "a Freeman" of the cities of Edinburgh, Bath, Reims and Warsaw. He held the Gold Medals of the cities of Paris, New York and Jerusalem. Honorary degree from Kalamazoo College[24] Elected an Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College in 1991 He received the 1997 Prince of Asturias Award in the Concord category along with Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. On 15 May 1998 Menuhin received the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword (Portugal).[25] Cultural references[edit] The catchphrase "Who's Yehoodi?" popular in the 1930s and 1940s was inspired by Menuhin's guest appearance on a radio show, where Jerry Colonna turned "Yehoodi" into a widely recognized slang term for a mysteriously absent person. It eventually lost all of its original connection with Menuhin. Menuhin was also "meant" to appear on The 1971 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show but could not do so as he was "opening at the Argyle Theatre, Birkenhead in Old King Cole". He was replaced by Eric Morecambe in the famous "Grieg's Piano Concerto by Grieg" sketch featuring the conductor André Previn; he was also invited to appear on their 1973 Christmas Show to play his "banjo" as they said playing his violin would not be any good; he ruefully said that "I can't help you". A picture of Menuhin as a child is sometimes used as part of a Thematic Apperception Test.[26] Yehudi Menuhin: the violinist who changed the world Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) practises the violin at home CREDIT: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES   Ivan Hewett, classical music critic  6 APRIL 2016 • 6:00AM To mark the superstar violinist's centenary, Ivan Hewett looks back on his remarkable life and career     Yehudi Menuhin was one of the greatest violinists the world has ever seen. Everyone knows that. While he was still in short trousers, he astonished allcomers with his gifts, which were more world-conquering than Mozart’s. For a while, during the 1930s, he was literally “the most famous kid on the planet,” as his biographer Humphrey Burton put it. At the 13-year-old Menuhin’s concerto debut in Berlin in 1929, Einstein was in the audience, and afterwards was heard to remark tearfully that “the day of miracles is not over... Our dear old Jehovah is still on the job”. The conductor was no less than Bruno Walter (friend of Gustav Mahler), who long afterwards recalled “he was a child, and yet he was a man and a great artist.” What made Menuhin special was not his technical assurance, spell-binding though that was. It was a soulful penetrating sweetness, which made him one of the few classical violinists recognisable just from their sound. Menuhin with his wife Diana in London CREDIT: BRENUARD PRESS  But Menuhin (born 100 years ago this month) became more than that. He wasn’t simply another Joseph Szigeti or Jascha Heifetz or Mischa Elman, to name three other towering violinists of the mid-20th century. It’s the nature of that mysterious “more” which still fascinates people, 17 years after his death. There’s a story in Yehudi Menuhin’s memoirs, Unfinished Journey, which points towards it. In 1941, when Menuhin was 25 and had already been famous for over a decade, he was invited to a party on Long Island, and joined the guests at a shooting range. “Never before having handled a rifle, or any weapon, I put the gun to my left shoulder, violin-fashion; then, with the first and so far only shots of my life, hit the bulls-eye twice.” That ability to focus all his powers on whatever was in front of him struck everyone who met Menuhin. It was revealed in his charm, which was famously irresistible. “The world’s greatest seducer” is how he was described by his second wife Diana, an unconventional, upper-middle class Englishwoman with whom Menuhin settled in London in 1959. She probably said it through gritted teeth, as it was she who had to organise Menuhin and remind him that he really must stop doing his Yoga workout as there was a concert to prepare for. Looked at from this angle, Menuhin seems over-blessed by the Almighty: born with huge gifts, to loving parents who spared nothing to nurture his talents, surrounded his whole life by adoring women, and money in plentiful supply. Looked at another way, he seems a thwarted man. In mid-life came the crisis that would have finished a lesser man. This was the appearance of technical problems in playing the violin, in a player who, until then, could surmount the most virtuoso technical feats without appearing to try. Indian musician Ravi Shankar performs on stage with Yehudi Menuhin in 1965.  CREDIT: GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS His bow-arm became strangely unsteady, and his intonation at times wayward. These problems became more severe until, in later years, a Menuhin performance could be a toe-curling experience. On the personal side, relations within the Menuhin family were vastly complex and strained. His parents , radical left-leaning Jewish immigrants from Russia, had settled in San Francisco in 1918. Menuhin was taught never to show feelings by his mother. In his memoirs he tells how, during his childhood, his practising moved his mother to tears, and for a while improved relations between his parents. “I beheld myself as a peace-maker destined to cut Gordian knots, to adjudicate instantly the neurotic quarrels we pursue with one another, to make people evacuate their fortresses and stage a global embrace. Perhaps the knots left uncut, the briefs unsolved and the ramparts still standing should teach an artist to modify the scope of his aspirations. I have never resigned myself.” There in that anecdote we have the essence of Menuhin, and the clue as to how, when those technical problems struck, he was able to reinvent himself. He shifted the focus from the local – playing the violin – to grander issues. That shift brought its own problems, in the sense that he bestowed his attention from a lonely Olympian height. From that vantage point the subtleties of human interactions at ground level tended to escape him. He was someone who wanted to make everyone happy, and the world a better place, through his music. Was this arrogance? It didn’t appear so, because Menuhin was far quicker to criticise himself than other people. The distance from ordinary humanity allowed his miraculous gift to flower unimpeded, but it had a downside, in the shape of strange fits of metaphysical dread. Even as a child Menuhin would be gripped with a sense of futility, wondering how on earth he would fill all the hours of his life. Against this threatening emptiness was music, that wonderful thing which demanded the utmost discipline, and in return had the power to heal the soul and dissolve long-held enmities. The existence of music was for Menuhin proof that “in every man there was a spark of God”, as Dostoevsky had put it. This was why he travelled with Benjamin Britten to Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated, to play for the half-starved inmates. It was an assertion of his belief that good must eventually triumph. It was why he supported the campaign to pardon Wilhelm Furtwängler, the great German conductor who was accused of aiding and abetting the Nazi regime. For this magnanimous attitude, Menuhin was condemned on all sides. He was described as a 'bad Jew’ by pianist Arthur Rubinstein, one of many who boycotted Furtwängler’s appointment as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Menuhin was furious, describing their behaviour as '’beneath contempt’, and was vindicated when Furtwängler was eventually declared innocent. The habit of believing the best of people, which so exasperated his family, could annoy the powerful too. As president of the International Music Council, he gave a speech in the Soviet Union in which he praised the dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The speech went unreported in the Soviet media. He chided the Israeli government on its repressive policies towards Palestinians, in a speech he gave on receiving the Wolf Prize in 1991. If Menuhin can appear naïve on the political level, on the cultural level his musings appear amazingly prescient and wise. He was an advocate of “world music” decades before anyone invented that term. Far more than the Beatles, he was the conduit through which the glories of Indian classical music reached the West, thanks to his recordings with famous sitar-player Ravi Shankar. He fretted about environmental issues, and was proud of being one of the first people in the UK to own an electric car. He founded a school for musically gifted children in Stoke d’Abernon, where the curriculum favours the all-round education of its pupils, rather than the obsessive focus on music typical of specialist schools elsewhere. At the heart of all this activity was a burning sense that to be happy and fulfilled, human beings need to reunite the two sides of their nature, the instinctive and the rational. Menuhin was made painfully aware, through his own technical difficulties, that instinct was not enough. With moving humility, in later life he put himself back to school, determined to understand the mysteries of the violin, of music, and – on a higher level – the relation between mind, body and spirit. Undertaking this laborious journey in order to reunite the scattered shards of human nature was a task he described as “the saving grace of true civilisation.”  Few people in our time have embodied that grace more movingly than he. Yehudi Menuhin (Conductor, Violin) Born: April 22, 1916 - New York, USA Died: March 12, 1999 - Berlin, Germany The American violinist and conductor, Yehudi Menuhin, had one of the longest and most distinguished careers of any violinist of the 20th century. Menuhin was born in New York of Russian-Jewish parents, recent immigrants to America. By the age of seven his performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto had found him instant fame. As a teenager he toured throughout the world and was considered one of the greats long before his twentieth birthday. Even in his earliest recordings one can sense deeply passionate responses to the great composers. Though considered a technical master, it is his highly charged emotional playing that set him apart. As a young man Yehudi Menuhin went to Paris to study under violinist and composer George Enesco. Enesco was a primary influence on Menuhin and the two remained friends and collaborators throughout their lives. During the thirties, Menuhin was a sought after international performer. Over the course of World War II he played five hundred concerts for Allied troops, and later returned to Germany to play for inmates recently liberated from the concentration camps. This visit to Germany had a profound effect on Menuhin. As a Jew and a classical musician, Yehudi Menuhin had a complex relationship with German culture. He was fluent in German and deeply influenced by classical German composers. Menuhin found in the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler an important musical peer. Despite accusations of Wilhelm Furtwängler's pro-Nazi sympathies, Menuhin continued to support him and his work. It seemed that for many years, Menuhin led a double life. He was an outspoken supporter of dozens of causes for social justice, while also longing for a solitary life where he could ignore the concerns of society and attend only to the history of music and his role within it. Throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s, Yehudi Menuhin performed and made recordings from the great works of the classical canon. During this time he also began to include rarely performed and lesser known works. One of his greatest achievements is the commissioning and performing of Sonata for Solo Violin by Béla Bartók. In Béla Bartók, Menuhin found a composer of deep emotion and pathos that mimicked his own. Béla Bartók's work was at once technically rigorous and open to interpretive playing. Of Menuhin, Béla Bartók said he played better than he imagined he would ever hear his work played. Their collaboration is considered one of the greats of twentieth-century classical music. By the 1960’s, Yehudi Menuhin began to increase the scope of his musical involvement. In 1963 he opened the Yehudi Menuhin School, a school for musically gifted children. He also began conducting, which he would continue to do until his death. He conducted in many of the important music festivals and nearly every major orchestra in the world. It was around this time he also broke from his traditional roots and did work outside of the classical genre. One of his most successful ventures out of traditional performance was with the great Indian composer and sitarist Ravi Shankar. Throughout the last twenty years of his life, Yehudi Menuhin continued to engage in every aspect of musical work. As a performer, a conductor, a teacher, and a spokesperson, he spent his seventies and eighties as one of the most active musicians in the world. He was a constant contributor to religious, social, and environmental organizations throughout the world.***** Hephzibah Menuhin (20 May 1920 – 1 January 1981) was an American-Australian pianist, writer, and human rights campaigner. She was sister to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and to the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. She was also a gifted linguist and writer, co-authoring several books and writing many papers with her second husband, Richard Hauser. Contents 1 Early life 1.1 Australian connection 2 Career and causes 2.1 London 3 Death and legacy 4 Memorial 5 References 6 External links Early life[edit] Hephzibah Menuhin was born in San Francisco, California. Through her father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty. Her mother, Marutha, has been described as "dominant and controlling".[1] The Menuhin children had little formal schooling. Hephzibah spent only five days at a San Francisco school, where she was classed as educationally backward. Her parents took her out of school and taught her to read and write at home.[2] She started studying the piano at the age of four, initially with Judith Blockley, a specialist in teaching young children, and later with Lev Shorr, a Russian-born grand-pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and future teacher of Leon Fleisher.[3] She gave her first recital in San Francisco in 1928 when she was eight.[2] She then studied with Rudolf Serkin in Basel and Marcel Ciampi in Paris.[2] In 1933 she and Yehudi made their first recording (a Mozart sonata), which won the Candid Prize as best disc of the year. Her public debut was on 13 October 1934, at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. The siblings performed in the New York Town Hall and Queen's Hall in London, and Hephzibah gave solo recitals in most of the major cities of Europe and America.[2] Australian connection[edit] In March 1938, after a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Bernard Heinze introduced Hephzibah and Yehudi to the Australian brother and sister, Lindsay and Nola Nicholas, heirs to the Australian 'Aspro' pharmaceutical fortune.[4] In quick succession, Yehudi (aged 21) married Nola, and Hephzibah (aged 17) married Lindsay,[2] abandoning her plans to give her debut recital in Carnegie Hall, New York.[5] She moved with Lindsay Nicholas to his grazing property "Terrinallum" near Derrinallum, Victoria, where she spent the next 13 years.[6] She started a traveling library for children and bore two sons, Kronrod and Marston Nicholas. However, while she curtailed her musical career, she did not entirely abandon it. She played with the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras[6] and she and Yehudi played together many times during his 1940 tour of Australia. She gave solo recitals, supported local activities such as the Griller Quartet, and was involved with Richard Goldner in the foundation of Musica Viva Australia.[6] She befriended many displaced European musicians who had emigrated to Australia. During this time she played the Australian premiere of Bartók's Second Piano Concerto.[2] Both of the Menuhins' marriages to the Nicholases ended in divorce. Hephzibah's own two children remained with their father, Lindsay Nicholas.[citation needed] Career and causes[edit] In 1947, she played at the Prague Spring Music Festival in a concert organised by Paul Morawetz, a Melbourne businessman. He took her to see the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which had a profound effect on her, forcing her to confront the meaning of her own Jewish heritage,[5] and they entered a romantic relationship which lasted for several years.[2] In 1951 she and Yehudi played at the opening of the Royal Festival Hall in London, then made a concert tour of Australia and played and broadcast for the ABC. She supported all types of causes with concerts and recitals, such as the National Music Camp Association, and she was outspoken about the influence of television on children. In Sydney she was soloist in Juan José Castro's piano concerto, with the composer conducting (he was at that time the chief conductor of the Victorian Symphony Orchestra).[2] In 1954 she moved to Sydney, where she gave concerts and opened her home to anyone in need.[7] London[edit] In Sydney, Hephzibah Menuhin met and became involved with Richard Hauser, an Austrian Quaker sociologist and social commentator who had moved to Sydney with his family, then wife Ruth Hauser, and their daughter Eva. Hephzibah divorced her husband and married Hauser in Sydney in 1955. Two years later Menuhin and Hauser moved to London with their daughter, Clara Menuhin-Hauser, where they fostered Michael Alexander Morgan, a boy of mixed Welsh and Nigerian background and who grew up with Clara.[8] They founded the Institute for Human Rights and Responsibilities, and the Centre for Group Studies, and later moved to Friends Hall, a Quaker settlement house in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London. They later ran a Human Rights refuge from their house at 16 Ponsonby Place in Pimlico. This also became the base for The Institute for Social Research, which Sir Richard Hauser ran until his death. They worked on small-steps conciliation and attempted to help minorities all over the world, and she was a passionate supporter of women's and children's rights.[citation needed] In 1977 Hephzibah Menuhin became the President of the British chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Hephzibah and Richard Hauser wrote "The Fraternal Society" (Bodley Head) together.[citation needed] In 1962 she and Yehudi toured Australia. She toured with Yehudi and the Menuhin Festival Orchestra: the United States and Canada in 1967, and Australia in 1970 and 1975. In 1977 she was a member of the judges' panel for the first Sydney International Piano Competition. In Melbourne that year she played at a concert at which her son, Dr Marston Nicholas, made his public debut as a cellist.[2] In 1979 Hephzibah Menuhin made her last Australian concert appearances, playing with Yehudi and the Sydney String Quartet. She appeared with her brother for the last time at the Royal Festival Hall in London in November 1979.[2] Death and legacy[edit] This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Hephzibah Menuhin died in London on 1 January 1981 in London, following a lengthy illness. Her brother, Yehudi, dedicated his Carnegie Hall concert of 22 February 1981 to her memory. Her recordings include Schubert's Trout Quintet with members of the Amadeus Quartet, Mozart concertos with her brother conducting, trios with Yehudi and Maurice Gendron, and sonatas with Yehudi. Memorial[edit] The annual $8,000 Hephzibah Menuhin Memorial Scholarship for young Australian pianists was established in 1980. It is administered alternatively by the University of Melbourne Faculty of Music and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The principal soloist's dressing room at the Melbourne Arts Centre's Hamer Hall was named in Hephzibah's honour.[2] In 1998 Curtis Levy produced and directed a well-received documentary, Hephzibah to critical acclaim. A biography An Exacting Heart was published in 2007 by Jacqueline Kent.[citation needed] A biography of Yehudi Menuhin and his family entitled Yehudiana – Reliving the Menuhin Odyssey by Philip Bailey, who worked on the Menuhin staff from 1976 until Yehudi's death in 1999, has been published in late 2008. This book contains some information concerning Hephzibah's life.[citation needed] Menuhin, Hephzibah (1920–1981) by Jacqueline Kent This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 18, (MUP), 2012 Hephzibah Menuhin (1920-1981), pianist and social activist, was born on 20 May 1920 in San Francisco, United States of America, second child of Russian-born Moshe Menuhin, manager of the Jewish Education Society, and his wife Marutha, née Sher.  Hephzibah’s childhood was shaped by the career of her elder brother Yehudi, who was widely regarded as the twentieth century’s greatest child prodigy violinist.  From 1926 the family travelled in Europe for long periods, the children all observing a strict regime of study and practice. Like her younger sister, Yaltah, Menuhin showed great early talent as a pianist and made her public début in San Francisco aged 8.  Although her parents rejected a career in music for her, she was allowed to be Yehudi’s accompanist.  In 1933 their recording of Mozart’s Sonata in A won the Candide prize, and their musical partnership continued at intervals for the rest of Hephzibah’s life. In 1934, while living in Paris, the family travelled with Yehudi on a concert tour to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.  They settled in Los Gatos, California, in 1936 and Hephzibah was offered a solo début with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for 1939.  After a performance in London in March 1938, she and Yehudi had been introduced by (Sir) Bernard Heinze to Lindsay and Nola Nicholas, the children of George Nicholas.  Yehudi and Nola quickly became engaged.  Hephzibah proposed to the twenty-one-year-old Lindsay; they married on 16 July 1938 in a civil ceremony at Los Gatos. Returning to Australia to live on the Nicholas’s sheep property Terinallum in Victoria’s Western District, Menuhin took to life in the country with enthusiasm—if with views on diet, dress and education seen by locals as idiosyncratic.  Unselfconsciously beautiful, with flowing golden hair, she gave concerts in Melbourne and other parts of Australia during World War II, often for charity, established Red Cross units in her area, and fostered Melbourne war orphans and refugees.  In 1948 she initiated and ran Victoria’s first travelling library for children. Continuing her concert career after the war, Menuhin supported the new Musica Viva Society of Australia, often toured with Ernest Llewellyn and introduced works by Bloch, Bartok and Shostakovitch to Australian audiences.  In 1947, during a tour of the USA and Europe with Yehudi, she visited Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), an experience that affirmed her Jewishness and exposed what she now saw as the smallness of her Australian life.  Questioning her political, religious and social assumptions, she began to speak out and write about progressive causes, including education and women’s issues.  Her interests in left-wing ideas and politics were encouraged by the Melbourne businessman, Paul Morawetz, who was her lover from 1946 to 1949. Menuhin’s marriage was increasingly troubled but it did not break until she met Richard Hauser in 1952.  A Viennese-born Jewish refugee, Hauser possessed a passionate devotion to social and humanitarian causes which fuelled her own.  Early in 1954 she left Nicholas and their two sons to live and work with Hauser in Sydney.  Divorced on 10 November 1954, she married Hauser at the registrar general’s office, Sydney, on 22 April 1955.  In March 1957 they left Australia and settled in London. Although continuing to perform, mainly in recitals with Yehudi and in chamber groups, Menuhin now considered her concert appearances subordinate to her work with Hauser.  Partly supported by wealthy philanthropists, they usually had at least twenty projects running at once, including counselling marginalised ethnic minorities, prison inmates and victims of domestic violence; undertaking social surveys for the British Home Office; working with the peace movement in India; and trying to establish human rights centres and to mediate between paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Together they wrote The Fraternal Society (1962), outlining their theories and practices. Colleagues and visitors found their work stimulating but undisciplined.  Their challenge was to encourage individuals to change destructive patterns of behaviour; their success is hard to evaluate.  While Menuhin always deferred to Hauser’s intuitive, autocratic brilliance, she was the better organiser, writer and strategic thinker.  In 1977-81 she served as British president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Menuhin frequently returned to Australia, sometimes to perform with her brother.  In 1977 she joined the judging panel for the first Sydney International Piano Competition.  In that year she developed cancer of the throat, against which she battled until her death in London on 1 January 1981.  She was survived by her husband, the two sons of her first marriage and the daughter of her second.  A piano scholarship in her memory was established by the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music, and a chair in piano studies at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem.HEPHZIBAH MENUHIN 1920 – 1981 by Charlotte Greenspan Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist and social activist, was born in San Francisco, on May 20, 1920, the second of three children. Her parents, Moshe and Marutha (Sher) Menuhin, were Russian Jews who came to the United States by way of Palestine. Neither Moshe nor Marutha was a trained musician, but all of their children—Yehudi, Hephzibah, and Yaltah—showed extraordinary musical gifts. Moshe was a student of mathematics and a Hebrew teacher before he gave his full time and energy to managing his son Yehudi’s career as a violinist. Marutha also taught Hebrew before she devoted herself to rearing her family. Hephzibah’s education, like her brother’s and sister’s, was entirely entrusted to her parents and private tutors. She studied piano with Judith Blockley and Lev Schorr in San Francisco, Marcel Ciampi in Paris, and Rudolf Serkin in Basel. She was also an accomplished linguist, having mastered Hebrew, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian by her teen years. Her debut recital, at which she played works of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, and Weber, took place in San Francisco in 1928, when she was eight years old. In 1933, she and her brother recorded the Mozart Violin Sonata in A. This recording won the Candide prize for the best recording made in France that year. The prize money was donated to charity. The next year, Hephzibah and Yehudi began to perform together, giving one concert in Paris, one in London, and one in New York. Reviewers were in agreement that Hephzibah’s talent as a pianist equaled that of her world-renowned virtuoso violinist brother, but the Menuhin parents were determined that Hephzibah’s public appearances would be strictly limited. Her mother told an interviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, “Hephzibah yearns for solo recitals and a career of her own.... I tell her that the only immortality to which a woman should aspire is that of a home and children.” The youngest Menuhin child, Yaltah, also a skilled pianist, did not perform publicly in her youth at all. The Menuhin parents were less vigilant in protecting their children from early marriages to people with whom they were only slightly acquainted. In 1938, when Yehudi was twenty-two, Hephzibah was eighteen, and Yaltah was sixteen, all three Menuhin children married. These marriages all ended in divorce. Hephzibah’s husband, Lindsay Nicholas, was the son of a millionaire Australian analgesic manufacturer and the owner of a 24,000-acre sheep ranch. His sister, Nola Nicholas, was Yehudi’s first wife. Hephzibah spent most of the 1940s in Australia, rearing her two sons, Kronrod and Marston, and concertizing. She liked to perform with chamber groups and with orchestras, and was a persuasive advocate for contemporary music, introducing, among other works, the Bartok piano concerti to Australia. In addition, she founded the first traveling library in Australia to bring works to the Outback. In 1947, after a hiatus of almost a decade, she once again began concertizing with her brother. They gave a series of concerts in Israel in 1950; they also performed together in many cities in the United States and throughout Europe. After World War II, Hephzibah’s marriage to Lindsay Nicholas ended. She married Vienna-born sociologist Robert Hauser and moved with him to England, where their daughter, Clara, was born in 1955. With her husband, Hephzibah worked to assist the poor, the homeless, and those recently ill. She also worked for the causes of peace and disarmament, serving as president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Hephzibah Menuhin died at age sixty in 1981, after a long battle with cancer. Her legacy of recordings include performances of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Franck, and Enesco. She is also remembered for her devotion to the needy and suffering. Bibliography EJ, s.v. “Menuhin, Yehudi”; Magidoff, Robert. Yehudi Menuhin: The Story of the Man and the Musician (1955); Menuhin, Moshe. The Menuhin Saga: The Autobiography of Moshe Menuhin (1984); Menuhin, Yehudi. Unfinished Journey (1977); NYTimes, January 2, 1981; Palmer, Tony. Menuhin: A Family Portrait (1991); Rolfe, Lionel Menuhin. The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey (1978); UJE, s.v. “Menuhin, Yehudi”; Wymer, Norman. Yehudi Menuhin (1961). HEPHZIBAH MENUHIN YOU ARE HERE: HOMELATEST HEADACHE TABLETS AND A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIME SHARE  BY ROZ BARKER Ever heard of Aspro headache tablets? What about world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his sister Hephzibah? Incredibly, there is an Australian connection that links them. As the Data Quality officer at the NFSA, I regularly research performers, actors and copyright holders, developing concise biographies and adding birth and death dates for future reference. It was while researching Hephzibah Menuhin that I came across this story. 'Aspro’ was developed in Australia by George Nicholas, a chemist, in 1915. Aspirin had been developed in Germany by Bayer but, as a German product, it was suddenly unavailable when the First World War broke out. George set out to manufacture the product in Australia, eventually succeeded, and the product was named Aspro as the Aspirin name could eventually be claimed by Bayer. Sales skyrocketed, and the Nicholas family became very wealthy. In this clip from episode 16 of This Fabulous Century: The Home (1979), Australian producer and presenter, Peter Luck, narrates the story of the development of Aspro. The clip starts with an advertisement for Aspro with Roger Climpson, a well-known newsreader at the time, whose presence lends the product a certain gravitas. The advertisement is an interesting example of early television advertising, especially for its repeated prominent visual representation of the brand name, ‘Aspro’, to make the product synonymous with pain relief. This is an advertising technique still used today. Luck then provides a tightly constructed history of the development of Aspro over a clever montage of archival images including paintings, illustrations, newspaper clippings, photographs and advertisements. As can be seen in this clip, the historical material and lively narration are used effectively to tell a compelling moment in Australian history. This Fabulous Century: The Home, episode 16 George Nicholas and his first wife had four children. The eldest, Lindsay, and his younger sister, Nola, became talented musicians. In March 1938, George Nicholas and his second wife, Shirley, took 22-year-old Lindsay and 19-year-old Nola to London. At the same time, in the same hotel, were the talented American Menuhin siblings: violinist Yehudi, just 21, and pianist Hephzibah, 17. The two sets of siblings met backstage after one of the Menuhins’ concerts and chemistry again transformed the lives of the Nicholas family! Yehudi became entranced by Nola and soon married her in London. Hephzibah also started to see Lindsay as a potential husband. Perhaps somewhat boldly for the times, Hephzibah proposed to Lindsay, despite the fact that he had a girlfriend back in Australia, and they were married in California later that year. Yehudi and Nola went to live in the United States, but Hephzibah travelled to Australia with Lindsay after her marriage. They moved to Lindsay’s home, 'Terrinallum’, a sheep station nearly 340 km from Melbourne. The sophisticated musician living on a sheep station in rural Victoria created a media sensation at the time. How would she adapt to rural life and support her husband’s activities? Hephzibah gave up a promising career as a concert pianist to become Mrs Lindsay Nicholas. She had two boys, Konrod and Marston, during the Second World War, and did not use the piano for concert practice until 1940, when her brother arrived in Australia for a series of concerts with Hephzibah. She helped establish the Red Cross in the district and put her own money into the local school and Victoria’s first travelling library, for the children of the district. Hephzibah was a glamorous hostess and contemporary sources describe the parties, often with impressive guests like Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh, in 1948. We have a recording of Olivier and Leigh from the time reciting Banjo Paterson, apparently to debunk the idea that only local voices were suited to delivering the rhythm of Australian verse. Hephzibah also supported many postwar European migrants. In 1948 she worked with Austrian-born Richard Goldner in the establishment of the Musica Viva society, which still operates today. The marriages of both Yehudi and Hephzibah ended in divorce. Hephzibah met and married Viennese sociologist Richard Hauser in 1955. Hauser and his then wife Ruth and daughter Eva had come to Sydney to work for the New South Wales State Government and he and Hephzibah met in Sydney in 1951. Hauser’s daughter Eva became Eva Cox, a passionate feminist, social commentator and advocate for social change, like Hephzibah. Hephzibah and Richard relocated to London and remained married until her death from throat cancer in 1981. In total, she spent 17 years in Australia. You can learn more of her story in Hephzibah (Curtis Levy, Australia, 1998), winner of the AFI Award for Best Documentary in 1999.      ebay4677