Menuhin had his first violin lessons just after the age of four in San Francisco with the violin teacher Sigmund Anker. He immediately showed extraordinary talent. He continued to study with Louis Persinger, and performed with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1924. and in New York in 1926. He performed in Paris in February 1927, after which he studied with the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu. When he played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the conductor Fritz Busch in New York in November 1927 he immediately became world famous. He not only had the most amazing technique but he also understood the music just as well as any grown up musician. As a child he made many recordings. One of the most remarkable was a recording made in 1932 of Elgar’s Violin concerto. Elgar, who was then 75 years old, was conducting the orchestra.
During World War II Menuhin gave more than 500 performances for American and allied soldiers. He was the first person to perform in the Paris Opéra after the war and he went with the composer Benjamin Britten to perform for the people who were prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, after they were made free in April 1945. He returned to Germany in 1947 to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Many Jews said he should not have done this, because they said that Furtwängler had played for the Nazis who had killed so many Jews, but Menuhin said it was the right thing to do.
Menuhin continued to give many performances, but there were times when he did not play so well. He may have worked too hard. He had to give himself time off performing and he practised very carefully and studied meditation and yoga to help him get over his problems.
Menuhin continued to perform until he was quite old. He did not just play classical music but explored other kinds of music such as jazz which he often played with the famous jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and he explored Indian music and played with the sitarist Ravi Shankar. He also conducted some of the world’s greatest orchestras and founded his own chamber orchestra.
In 1959 Menuhin made his home in London. He performed a lot in England, including at the Bath Festival, but also continued to travel all over the world.
In 1962 he started a school for children who had special musical talent. It was called the Yehudi Menuhin School. The school is in Stoke d'Abernon, Surrey, just south of London.
In 1983 he founded together with Robert Masters the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists. Many of today’s famous violinists won prizes at this competition, including Tasmin Little and Nikolaj Znaider.
In 1991 he was given the Wolf Prize by the Israeli Government. In the Israeli Knesset he gave a speech in which he criticised Israel's occupation of the West Bank. He said that it was not right for the Jews, who have lived by strict moral behaviour for 5000 years, not to let others (meaning the Palestinians) live their lives there too.
Menuhin had many pupils who became famous, including Nigel Kennedy.
Yehudi Menuhin was married twice. He first married Nola Nicholas, daughter of an Australian industrialist, and sister of Hephzibah Menuhin's first husband. They had two children. After their divorce, he married the British ballerina and actress Diana Gould. They had two sons, Gerard and Jeremy, who became a pianist.
The name "Yehudi" means 'Jew' in Hebrew. It means "Thanks to God".
Yehudi Menuhin was given many honours from all over the world. These include the Commander of the Legion d’honneur, a Knight of the Dutch Order of Oranje Nassau, an Hon. KBE, and the Nehru Award for International Understanding. In 1993 he was made a life peer and became Lord Menuhin.
Lord Menuhin died in Berlin, Germany, from bronchitis.
Soon after his death, the Royal Academy of Music was given the Yehudi Menuhin Archive, a very large collection of musical books, letters etc. that had belonged to Yehudi Menuhin.
Yehudi Menuhin School
The Yehudi Menuhin School is a private music school in Cobham, Surrey, England. It was started in 1963 by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
The school is very small: there are about sixty pupils who are boys and girls between the ages of eight and nineteen. The children must have extremely good musical talent. They all play at least one musical instrument: either a stringed instrument or piano. They are taught other subjects as well, but music is the most important subject, and they are given lots of time to practise their instrument as well as music lessons to help them develop their special musical skills in classical music. Famous musicians who were pupils at the school include Nicola Benedetti, Nigel Kennedy, Tasmin Little and Alina Ibragimova.
Ofsted rate the school as 'outstanding'.
Recipe
A recipe is a list of instructions that shows how to prepare or make something such as a food dish.
Modern-day recipes are usually made up of several parts:
Recipes from earlier times often included much less information: Older recipes usually just reminded a person of the ingredients needed.
The earliest known recipes are from 1600 and came from an Akkadian tablet from southern Babylonia. The ancient Egyptians painted hieroglyphics showing the preparation of food. Many recipes are known from ancient Greece. Mithaecus's cookbook was an early one, but most of it has been lost. Athenaeus quotes one short recipe in his Deipnosophistae. Roman recipes are known with some of them starting in the 2nd century B.C with Cato the Elder's De Agri Cultura. Many other authors of this period explained eastern Mediterranean cooking in Greek and Latin.
King Richard II of England asked someone to make a recipe book called "Forme of Cury" in 1390. Around the same time another book was published entitled "Curye on Inglish". Both books give an idea of how food was made and served in the noble classes of England at that time.
By the 1400s, manuscripts appeared, describing the recipes of that time. Many of these give very good information and record the re-discovery of many herbs and spices including coriander, parsley, basil and rosemary. Many of these herbs and spices had been brought back from the Crusades.
During the 1500s and 1600s, printed books appeared. The large houses tried to be better than each other, and books were written on how to manage households and prepare food. In Holland, and England, the noble families competed to see who could make the most splendid foods.
By the 1660s cooks published their own books explaining their recipes, in competition with their rivals. Many of these books have now been translated and can be found online.
In Europe, none had such influence as the top French chefs. They built the haute cuisine which others copied. La Varenne (1615–1678), Carême (1784–1833) and Escoffier (1846–1935) were the great innovators.
By the 1800s, cooking had become a hobby throughout the world. Using the newest technology and using a new publishing idea, Mrs Beeton (1836–1865) published her famous ‘Book of Household Management’, in 24 parts between 1857 and 1861. Around that same time the American cook Fannie Farmer (1857–1915) devoted herself to cooking. She published the book ‘The Boston Cooking School Cookbook’ in 1896 which had 1849 recipes.
The next revolution in popular culture came with introduction of the media cooks. The first was Philip Harben who was first on radio, with newspaper columns and books. Then he was first on British television, before Fanny Craddock.