Yehudi Menuhin talks to Martine Leca - Interview

Martine Leca

A former child prodigy, one of the great violinists of the century, Yehudi Menuhin has also conducted, directed several music festivals and founded a music school in England. A man of peace, he played for the Red Cross during the Second World War and continues to be a staunch defender of human rights. From 1969 to 1975 he was president of UNESCO'S International Music Council and is presently a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. He recently created the "Muse" project which seeks to provide European children with education for peace through music.

* You gave your first concert at the age of seven. How did you come to terms with the gift that has taken you so far?

--I accepted it naturally. Later on, daily practice of yoga--in which the body is like a root shooting simultaneously skyward and into the earth--along with my fundamentally robust nature, has kept me from going astray. I was also certain that my music helped to make the world a better place. That was my first and most abiding wish. My ambition was not to become a virtuoso, a music-making machine, but an intermediary who could reveal the joy that exists in all of us and be receptive to others. My soul has never been imprisoned by the straitjacket of technique. On the contrary, it is my Slav soul, with its age-old wealth of instinct, that has made me play naturally.

* You have been called "the Mozart of the violin". Has being a virtuoso imposed constraints on you?

--My father set himself the task of helping me and looking after my career. He had nothing in common with Mozart's father, who was overbearing and vain and presented his genius of a son to the courts of France and other European countries. My court was--and still is--the public, the people who come to uplift their minds and souls so that they can forget their everyday troubles. No, learning to play the violin was never an imposition for me.

The route from the head to the heart must always be direct. When, at the age of seven, I held my first violin, this route was already mapped out within me. I owe this rigour, these standards that governed my childhood, to my upbringing and to my nature. Later I discovered a more carefree attitude to life, because my teacher--Enescu(1)--taught me to play unsystematically, intuitively. I became known as a young virtuoso. I went from concert to concert, pursued by the desire to float like a balloon and discover the marvellous lightness of being.

However, the lightness I was looking for was concealed by a sensation of heaviness. It took me twenty years to feel the weight of one finger and to understand the relationship of music--which comes from the soul--to the muscles. I then realized that technique must take a spiritual course which invoIves the body. The body is a noble thing: it should be given life through dance, singing and music, and not be crucified. Some civilizations have understood this, others not.

Art develops the intellectual, physical, imaginative and sensory spheres, and hence all human potential. We use only part of our capabilities because education does nut go to the source. As a source of equilibrium and tolerance, music should be brought into the schools as a form of self-fulfilment, a new philosophy, especially in primary schools, with the participation of monitors, musicians, specialists and composers. Musical education, which has hitherto been regarded as an optional subject, can change people's social behaviour.

* Why in primary schools rather than at other levels?

-- Music encourages revelation, a sense of union with others and with our environment. It enables us to interpret our relationship with the earth's rhythms and express emotions like joy and pain. In remedying the evils of a society blighted by consumerism and the excesses of materialism, children are in a way our teachers and redeemers. Because they are so genuine, they react immediately to encouragement and attention. Schools nowadays often bring together children from different ethnic backgrounds. An exchange of memories, cultures and sensibilities is encouraged by this diversity because children, by nature, do not succumb to the temptation of rejecting others on ethnic grounds.

They succumb to it when they are adults, depending on how narrow-minded they become or on the credence they give to false information--for xenophobia is a falsehood and is based on myths. The adult in us kills the child. Now the child must teach the adult. Musicians, composers and well-intentioned teachers must identify with children, respect them, and not deceive them by giving false answers,by evasiveness or silence. A driver must know that the road is his guide and that he must adapt his driving to the road, not to his idea of it. There can be no mistaking a straight stretch for a bend in the road.

* You say that you have retained a childlike naively and freshness. What is your recipe for this?

--Quite simply, I have never let myself give in to negative ideas, the lugubriousness and hand-wriging which poison our society. I prefer happiness. And so, I have no difficulty in projecting myself into the feelings of hundreds of millions of children, into their games and into their suffering. Since these children are the continuity of humanity, they should be given a hearing. They are a living source that will help us to recreate ourselves. In a sense, this infanticidal adult world of ours deserves the punishment it inflicts on itself, like the scorpion that dies from its own sting. In periods of so-called peace--a word that to my mind no longer corresponds to reality--the world spends its energy preparing for future wars.

* Do you think that music is capable of changing human relations, of fuming people towards peace?

--Sharing is the best guarantee of peace. We must encourage everything--such as music and the arts--that encourages sharing and exclude everything that destroys or harms the growth of harmony between people.

During the Second World War, I often played for the troops: it was my form of resistance The faces of those men who had stared death in the face and who would perhaps die the next day, shone with a kind of ecstasy, the ecstasy that is within our reach, if only we want to grasp it and pass it on. Music is the antidote to criminality. Musicians will never be criminals, nor will those who practice the martial arts, because they purge themselves of all their negative impulses. The energy that flows into them amplifies and enriches their relationship with the world and with other people.

Our times don't teach the higher, transcendent things. But music and singing can do so. Singing brings people together; it harmonizes body and mind. It unites people with others and creates a symbiosis. Everybody has to adapt to the rhythm and the notes. This produces a collective effect on the emotions and the intellect. Music and singing have nothing to do with consumerism; they are part of life.

* Are you set apart from the world by the ecstasy and sublimation you experience when you play?

--Any work of art, or any interpretation of a work of art, is bound to be executed outside real life and time. Twentieth-century theatre seeks to render the world's tragedy expressionistically, to show us real blood being shed and people's real-life occupations. Even if it wishes to be close to the real world, art cannot coincide with it. Hence the need for sublimation.

Emotions must be distilled. Mozart could make people hear and see terrible events which, through the filter of art, they could listen to in their drawing-rooms and be profoundly moved. If art gets involved in reproducing reality on stage, it becomes a kind of television news broadcast. Art has better things to do. It performs a redeeming function. The artist's role isto guide human beings, who are too wrapped up in material things, towards ecstasy. In other words, to take social beings out of themselves and unite them to the work of art, which expresses the intense experience of the artist. This is the nature of the link with the public: a shared ecstacy created in a spirit of abnegation. You want to enwrap the audience in the the beauty and calm of the detachment that takes hold of you. It is the joy of feeling a natural sense of ecstasy at a time when artificial forms of ecstasy are so fashionable.

I have always liked to experience this sublime feeling and spread it round me. It is a paradoxical state which is at the same time very real and yet detached from the present. The Russians experience this state in their everyday lives--it is how they transcend themselves. They have a gift for drama. Their daily lives have always been so steeped in sadness and horror that they escape from it into the world of art, which lifts them out of distress and gives them life. When they sing, dance and play they draw on the drama of their daily lives which they transmute with incredible intensity and force.

I travelled with Russians during the war. Singing and reciting poems was their form of resistance. It was the expression of a spontaneous culture which had nothing to do with school; it was born of pain but also of indomitable hope. The survivors of the concentration camps have set us the same example: considering their physical and mental exhaustion, it is impossible to explain how some of them went on living. These people struggled and survived. My parents, who were Russian Jews, personified this blend of deep melancholy and dogged hope.

* Is this mystery, which seems such an important part of your make-up, religious in origin?

--No. I feel its presence above all in *he space we call reality, but which is to some extent beyond us. We do not know what existed before we were born or what will come to pass after we die. So we look for ways of creating ecstasy that are capable of liberating the mind from the body. But the body is not an impediment to the soul. On the contrary, everything hinges on mastering its rhythms and its breath.

I have achieved my relationship with the world without religion, through a sort of cosmic complicity with the world that weaves its web around me and in me and which I weave like everyone else. Religions create bonds between those who practice them, but I dread the excesses of adoration to which they give rise. Human beings in search of an existential support have the keys of their freedom within them. Individuals are the threads of this cosmic web, which is of divine essence. This attitude seems to me to be truer, closer to the human scheme of things than any form of religious worship.

We all have considerable reserves of energy which remain untapped or are repressed or even spoiled, in particular because of the very Western obsession with material things. Our worst actions are dictated to us by a desire for security and by fear. Ideally, we should root out these evils, which are within us. If we cannot manage to do so, we might at least adopt a conciliatory attitude, which would not necessarily mean giving up our resistance and determination. It is a question of striking a balance. There's no point in trying to smash a brick wall by knocking your head against it. Thought and mental energy can do the job.

So, as I grow older, I get pleasure from feeling light, freed from the burden of having to take sides. The only thing that interests me is a harmonious centre that is flexible and strong, stronger than the sum of the parts. This very simple arithmetic ought to suit societies whose centre is yielding under the pressure of extremes.

* You are a fervent adept of yoga. What part does it play in your attitude to the world?

--Yoga is a source of balance between earth, heaven end the self, a source of fusion not only with human beings but with animals, plants and the cosmos as a whole. It enables me to play by introducing the heartbeat of life and to understand intuitively what a composer is trying to say. For instance, Bach's "Chaconne", which I regard as the finest piece ever written for solo violin, admits neither gratuitous ornamentation nor aggressiveness. It is a work that demands nerves of steel. Human beings are like Bach's "Chaconne". They have to be capable of settling their own differences, balancing their opposites and negotiating their transformations, all the deaths and rebirths which are constantly changing them.

* Do you have a political philosophy?

--Politics captivates crowds which are taken in by the illusion of speech. I believe that all politicians should have a job outside politics. Politicians who were also cobblers, cooks or gardeners, who had direct experience of their country at every level, would be bead and shoulders above today's politicians. They would be really useful to their fellow citizens.

(1) Georges Enescu, Romanian composer and violinist (1881-1955).--Ed.

COPYRIGHT 1995 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group