Yehudi's secrets...

[calclass@earthlink.net]

California Classics Books
Post Office Box 29756, Los Angeles, California 90029



Contact: Author is at (323) 906--0262.


CALIFORNIA CLASSICS BOOKS DRAWS YOUR ATTENTION TO A RECENT ARTICLE IN 
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BY MUSIC CRITIC MARK SWED WHICH HEAPED HIGH AND 
IMPORTANT PRAISE ON OUR BOOK, "FAT MAN ON THE LEFT: Four Decades in 
the Underground," WRITTEN BY JOURNALIST LIONEL ROLFE. PLEASE DO NOT 
REPRODUCE THIS ARTICLE. IT'S FYI ONLY.



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     Tuesday, March 16, 1999 
     Home Edition 
     Section: Calendar 
     Page: F-2 

     A Wondrous Violinist Who Was a True Citizen of the World; 
     Appreciation: Menuhin touched many with his grace, and his 
influence will likely reach into the next century.; 

     By: MARK SWED 
     TIMES MUSIC CRITIC 


     In 1976, Yehudi Menuhin wrote a memoir entitled "Unfinished 
Journey." In 1996, he updated the book with "Unfinished Journey: 
Twenty Years Later." On Friday, Yehudi Menuhin--the violinist who 
inspired everyone from amateur violinist Albert Einstein to world 
leaders, and who was revered by musicians and audiences the world over 
for close to eight decades--finished his journey. 
     That journey was a spiritual quest, and it, more than his 
greatness as a violinist, will, I suspect, keep him a force into the 
next century and beyond. He was, at his best, a wondrous musician, the 
kind who could appear touched      by grace and transport a responsive 
listener into a sense of sharing that grace. 
     Still, he was not the century's greatest violinist. No one person 
has been. He played second fiddle to Heifetz's superhuman control, to 
Szigeti's striking originality as an interpreter, to Kreisler's 
melting tone. But no matter.
     Menuhin was something else. He was one of the world's best 
people. 
     Music, because it is primarily nonrepresentational and 
non-narrative, can present us with terrible moral dilemmas.
     Bad men and bad occasions have produced very good music. We 
embrace little art from Nazi Germany today except its music, be it 
wartime recordings of transportive German performances of Beethoven's 
Ninth Symphony     performed before audiences of rapt uniformed SS 
agents or the musical public's forgiveness of such Nazi collaborators 
as Karajan or Richard Strauss.
	With Menuhin we have no problem. George Steiner has called him 
"probably the most widely loved personality in the history of the 
performing arts." And it was with a near-saintly demeanor that Menuhin 
traveled his long journey that began with performances as a 7-year-old 
in short pants in San Francisco and continued right up to the end. He 
was 82 when he died Friday of heart failure in Berlin, where he had 
been scheduled to conduct.
	He wasn't, of course, a saint, nor could he possibly ever be 
canonized. His name, given by his famously prepossessing mother in 
response to an anti-Semitic remark from a landlord, means Jew in 
Hebrew.
	Menuhin, in fact, was a direct descendant of Russian rabbis who 
created the mystical Hasidic sect of Judaism. And, in a recent book, 
"Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground," Los Angeles 
writer Lionel Rolfe, who is Menuhin's nephew, describes the violinist 
as a kind of latter-day musical Bal Shem, the 18th century Russian 
Hasidic prophet and gentle man who existed as a serene presence in 
turbulent times.
	The Bal Shem's specialty was to create an ecstatic state of mind 
called Hitlahavut. "Through Hitlahavut," Rolfe writes, "the Messiah 
will be persuaded to come. Hitlahavut unites man with God in the 
wondrous state of      concentration where even the most oft-repeated 
actions become fresh again."
	That may also be the best description of Menuhin's playing that I 
have yet encountered, and it also tells us something about his utopian 
dreams. Those dreams began early. He writes that as a child he 
believed "that peace      might be visited upon the Earth if I could 
only play the Bach Chaconne well-enough in the Sistine Chapel." It was 
with a childish high mind he began making music, and he never lost 
those high ideals, which could be endearing,     inspiring and 
irritating.
	Menuhin tested humanity and himself. During World War II, he played 
before thousands of soldiers, looking deeply into the eyes of men he 
knew were about to die and attempting, like a mystical rabbi, to give 
them a final ecstasy to take into battle. At the other extreme, he 
played for concentration camp survivors at Belsen, trying to stir the 
ecstasy that had been drained from them. He then became the first Jew 
to play after the war with the Berlin Philharmonic, under Wilhelm 
Furtwangler, even though that meant death threats when he played in 
Israel.
	For Menuhin, world peace meant world peace--it meant letting go of 
ego. As a consequence, the descendant of Hasidic rabbis and the man 
whose name meant Jew felt comfortable in all religions and considered 
himself a      citizen of the world. Although devoted to Israel and 
the son of a Zionist, he defied the Jewish state time and again by 
promoting the Palestinian cause. He was as drawn to India--with its 
musicians and holy men--as he was to his      estate in London. He was 
made a British lord in 1993, but was also a defiant one, designing a 
coat of arms that includes a violin string, a round-wheeled Gypsy flag 
and a seven-branched Jewish candelabrum, which now sits in the House 
of Lords.

     Much has been made of what a peculiar character Menuhin was. He 
was shielded by important women in his life--his mother, who lived to 
be 100, his two musician sisters and his second wife, Diana. Rolfe, 
who's book "The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey" inspired a controversial 
television documentary about the dysfunctional family, writes in his 
latest book about the difficulty of having a revered genius for an 
uncle. Menuhin, who tirelessly supported good causes, could seem 
insensitive to the world next to him.
	But his vision was large. It encompassed much in music, including his 
famous collaborations with Ravi Shankar and Stephane Grappelli. It was 
greater than a problem bow arm that caused his sound to get ever more 
raw over the years. He could sound false notes on the fiddle and in 
his life. Even so, he strove to make the world better through music, 
and you could hear it in his playing, the heavenly innocent playing of 
the young man or the      profoundly insightful if raspy sound of the 
old man. And you can hear it in the echo of a journey that could never 
truly be finished. It was a path, not an end point, that he 
illuminated.