(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."