Menuhin is primarily an American phenomenon. He was probably the first child violin prodigy to come from the New World and become famous there. We can think of only one predecessor: Louis Persinger. Born in Rochester, but soon forgotten as a child prodigy even though benefitting from lessons with the Belgian violinist Ysaÿe, Persinger was, between 1914 and 1915, concert master of the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch, before being the first great teacher of...Yehudi Menuhin. As we shall see, the career of Louis Persinger was truly a dress rehearsal for that of Menuhin, as if the United States needed a prototype before producing Menuhin. His second great teacher, who made him feel like "a midget", was Enesco. Enesco was not American but a wanderer. In Vienna and then in Paris where he was the pupil of the Belgian Martin Marsick, Enesco was Romanian. But in his own country, he was not Romanian but Moldavian. Persinger and Enesco taught Menuhin in the style of the Franco-Belgian school, but as reinvented by exiles. In fact, Menuhin's playing was self-taught, a new style of playing, just as America is the new world. We can more easily understand, when listening to his pre-war recordings, Menuhin's famous statement that he would like to combine "Kreisler's elegance, Elman's sonority ('the violin that speaks') and Heifetz's technique". The role model for a career in these pre-war years was, of course, Heifetz. Menuhin was born in 1916, and Heifetz arrived in the United States in 1917, where his virtuosity had the effect of an explosion: the young Yehudi's education took place while America was acclaiming Heifetz. His first recordings, the most fascinating violinistically, attest to this influence. Heifetz, strictly from a technical point of view, is already our contemporary. We must not, however, forget that Heifetz's style, rather pretentious with his violin held very high, is not contemporary. We must wait one more generation before this feeling of a faded charm disappears definitively. For Menuhin, the major post-war event was his meeting with Furtwängler. Having spent two summers with the German violinist Adolf Busch Menuhin had already discovered German culture. In rehabilitating the German conductor accused of pro-Nazi sympathy, it is also an entire tradition, German culture in its totality, that this New York Jewish violinist means to defend in the midst of America's triumphant cheers. There is no definitive interpretation for Menuhin, but the search for repose, for a place where music, far from any pretension, vibrates naturally, where it can breathe more than show off. This opening of musical feeling beyond technique and schools, this fierce desire to gather music at the source, can be found today in a Gidon Kremer or a Gil Shaham. It is in this sense that Menuhin's lesson remains exemplary, today more than ever: born in America when Heifetz was triumphing in the media, Menuhin died in Berlin, closer to Adolf Busch and Wilhelm Furtwängler. |
