|  |
 | |
| Discernment. Online |
 Need a veena teacher? Music books? 
 Top |
 |
Book excerpt
Yehudi Menuhin was the first major artist to boycott South
Africa, vowing not to go until apartheid was overturned. Countless other bold political acts which made Yehudi much more than just a mere fiddler. Second part of an excerpt from Lionel Rolfe's important new book Death and Redemption in London and LA
Other times he affected things inadvertently. It was
Yehudi, for instance, who popularized Yoga in the west when
in the '50s an issue of Life Magazine showed a photograph of
him in the Lotus position. He also introduced his old friend,
Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar, to the west in a series of
recordings, East Meets West, - which directly affected the
Beatles' music.
In 1950, he played concerts in South Africa after reading
about apartheid in Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. At Paton's suggestion, my uncle played for the black African
boys at a reformatory school. When informed by his South African management that this was not allowed under his contract, he went further: on each morning he was to give a
concert for white South Africans, he gave free concerts for
black South Africans. When challenged he pointed out there
was no conflict, since blacks weren't allowed into the concert
halls he played in. Even if they could afford the tickets, he
added. That was how a young Desmond Tutu came to hear
him play in the shantytown in which he grew up.
Next, Yehudi was the first major artist to boycott South
Africa, vowing to do so until apartheid was overturned. Many
other artists followed suit. There are countless other acts such
as these which made Yehudi much more than just a mere
fiddler.
The most unnerving of our many meetings in the Los
Angeles area occurred at a luncheon at a hotel in Pasadena.
On this occasion he warned me the world was going to
become an uglier place - and that being a social activist was
becoming an increasingly risky proposition.
This unnerved me. It defied the whole logic of what the
family was, and certainly what that family tradition was with
which he had anointed me earlier.
It certainly contradicted what his beloved sister
Hephzibah was up to. Hephzibah and her husband, Richard,
ran a Center for Human Rights and Responsibilities at 16
Ponsonby Place, just off the Thames - near Westminster
Abbey. Revolutionaries from South African or Ireland gravitated around Ponsonby Place. Hephzibah told me that in
these countries, the center would have to work to protect the
rights of the other sides once they were vanquished. Richard
was a Viennese who survived a concentration camp with a
vision to save the world. He once had his head beaten in for
trying to stop Paki-bashing. Hephzibah's whole life was
changing the world.
Although she fought for social change, she did so with
the same sense of reverence her brother had about his
Hassidic ancestors. She treasured them. Mussia was a big
influence on Hephzibah. Mussia was a social worker at the
turn of the century in Jerusalem, and Hephzibah was head of
UNESCO's women's commission at one point. But it was
another sister who most motivated Moshe: Shandel. She had
committed suicide when the rebbe forbade her to marry the
man she loved. He had picked out someone else for her. She
committed the suicide the night of her wedding.
Moshe never stopped hating the rebbes for what they had
done to his Shandel and to him. After his own father was
killed by a crowd of Jew-haters led by priests carrying
crosses, the Rebbe ordered his mother to marry a man who
already had children. The man did not accept his new wife's
offspring. So Moshe was sent to Jerusalem to live with the
rebbe's representative there, who happened to be Moshe's
grandfather. In time Moshe's grandfather died, and he was
soon on his own. He was befriended by Arabs.
At one point, Yehudi felt he must distance himself from his father's rabid anti-Zionism. Even so, my uncle remained
ever suspect in eyes of many Jews. Partly, this was so
because of his support of Wilhelm Furtwangler, the conductor
of the Berlin Philharmonic throughout the Nazi years. (But
he had also saved the lives of many of its Jewish members.)
Still, he remained close to many in the Israeli consulate
in London. But when Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir
presented him with Israel's highest award, the Wolf Prize,
Yehudi took the opportunity to lecture him about Palestinian
rights.
Like most Jews, he wasn't terribly religious except in an
intellectual kind of way. But he was very conscious of Jewish
prophecy, and the role it played in making great music and
changing the world.
The Menuhins all seemed to have rather odd marriages,
starting with Moshe and Marutha. They also were very good
at dissecting the weaknesses in each other's marriages, (but
not their own). Yehudi and Hephzibah once asked me to get
my mother to leave Joel Ryce, her husband and my stepfather,
as if I had the power to do so. I told them it was not my place
to do so, even if at times I didn't get along with Joel.
Privately, I thought of telling them they should look at their
own rather eccentric marriages before condemning my mom's
marriage.
All the Menuhins -- my mom included -- rhapsodized about their spouses. A bit excessively, I think. Joel became a Jungian analyst of some note after he decided never to play another note as a pianist. He and my mom did a couple of
world tours as duo pianists.
In a very real way, the mystical tradition of the
Schneersohn went back to the 18th century when the whole
world was transforming from feudalism to industrialism.
The violin represented all those human values that had
preceded industrialism and had a hard time surviving it. The
dull, deadly pounding of the machine left little room for love,
creativity and imagination.
The warmth of the wooden violin had to be felt against
the clang of the steel of the industrial age, and the subsequent
heartlessness of the computer age where thinking robots
threaten our very existence.
Yehudi burdened me with a tradition that was completely
irrelevant to living in Los Angeles. I suspect the fact that I felt
so at home during my two visits to London in 1999 came
from the fact the city was closer to the traditions he
represented.
Perhaps had I perched at the edge of a cliff watching the
night sky in a remote, frozen place amongst white birch trees
shimmering in a moon-lit Russian snow, I might have better
understood the connection. You can be a man in the universe
connected to the cosmos by all kinds of mystical links, except
in the City of the Angels. Or at least that's how I felt.
Maybe I only got this from my mom. She moved to
London about forty years ago, after divorcing my dad. She
hated Los Angeles, her considerable influence on its music
scene as a pianist for many years notwithstanding.
She was a regular at the old "Evenings on the Roof"
series in the early '50s. She played music she didn't always
admire, but she felt composers had to be encouraged.
Similarly, she played a friend's avant garde piano music
in London, (proving that London could be as foolish as L.A.
any time). It was aleotoric "chance" music. The motifs would
come off mobiles swinging in the wind which blew in
through the roof. She would improvise on musical phrases
that were written on the mobiles. Such avant garde
pretentiousness was not her style, but she still felt an
obligation to participate.
You could almost say that Yehudi, Hephzibah and Yaltah
were products of the Wild West. Louis Persinger, one of
Yehudi's earliest teachers in San Francisco in the '20s, had
actually played violin on the frontier. Still - western
evocations aside -- it was fitting that Yehudi was
memorialized at Westminster Abbey, and during the last year
of the century and millennium.
Death is not a very noble thing. Our bodies give out, our
hopes and dreams and aspirations slide away into
nothingness. The skin wrinkles, already planning its eventual
disintegration from our skeletons. Our bodies shut down.
But something survives us all. If we are a Beethoven, or
perhaps a Yehudi, we leave the world a much richer place.
Maybe for all time. Most of us just affect those immediately
around us in our deaths. But that something indomitable in
the human spirit is there even in death - or maybe especially
in death - for every one of us.
Published with permission from Lionel Rolfe
Quick external links
Visit The Menuhin Foundation, Brussels
*Fantastic site -- Hitbox *Web's best -- Britannica *Superb coverage... worth tuning in to -- Rediff *Classy -- Deccan Herald
Books | Yellow pages | Archives | Guru's choice | Editorial | Home Copyright and disclaimer © 2000-2001, www.themusicmagazine.com |
