A child called “the Jew”
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City on April 22, 1916. His father, Moshe Mnuchin, came from Gomel in what is now Belarus and was descended from a line of rabbis; his mother, Marutha Sher, came from the Crimea. The couple had met in Ottoman-ruled Palestine before marrying in New York in 1914, and in 1919 they became American citizens and changed the family name to Menuhin. His name, too, carried a story. Menuhin later recounted that while his mother was pregnant, a New York landlady showing the couple an apartment assured them that she did not take Jews. They walked out, and his mother vowed that her baby would bear a name proclaiming his identity to the world. Yehudi means “Jew” in Hebrew.
The family moved to San Francisco, where Yehudi begged to learn the violin. He had his first lessons at four, and soon began studying with Louis Persinger, leader of the San Francisco Symphony, who became his devoted teacher and accompanist. His two younger sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah, also became gifted pianists. Yehudi never went to school: his parents educated the children at home, and the family’s life revolved around his music.
The wonder child
Menuhin made his formal debut with the San Francisco Symphony on February 29, 1924, at the age of seven, and his New York debut in 1926. The family then moved to Europe, where he studied in Paris with the Romanian violinist and composer George Enescu, whom he revered all his life, and later with Adolf Busch in Basel. In April 1929, just before his thirteenth birthday, he played the violin concertos of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in a single concert with the Berlin Philharmonic under Bruno Walter, and soon afterwards repeated the feat in Dresden. One Berlin critic described a chubby little boy who made the audience laugh as he walked on stage, and stop laughing the moment he began to play.
In 1932, aged sixteen, he recorded Elgar’s Violin Concerto in London with the composer himself conducting, a recording many listeners still consider unsurpassed. Between 1934 and 1936 he made the first complete recording of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin. In 1943 he played for Béla Bartók in New York and commissioned a work from him on the spot; the result, the Sonata for Solo Violin, which Menuhin premiered in 1944, was one of the composer’s last completed works. Unusually for a child prodigy, Menuhin made the transition to a long adult career, and his recording contract with EMI lasted almost seventy years.
Music in wartime
Menuhin was an opponent of the Nazi regime from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and refused to perform in Germany. When the Second World War came, he chose not to stay comfortably in California. He played at military and naval bases and in hospitals for the wounded, travelled in unheated aircraft to the remote Aleutian Islands, gave a concert in Hawaii for marines about to be sent into battle, and raised money for war charities. In 1943 he was decorated with the Cross of Lorraine for his services to the Free French.
He later said these years changed his idea of what a musician was for. Playing for soldiers who had never heard classical music, and for the sick and wounded, he saw that music could comfort the lonely and frightened as well as delight concert audiences. That conviction would shape everything he built in the second half of his life.
Bergen-Belsen, 1945
After the Allied victory in 1945, Menuhin asked the British Army of Occupation to let him play in Germany. In July he set out on a short tour of camps for survivors and displaced persons, accompanied at the piano by the English composer Benjamin Britten, who had asked to take the place of the pianist Gerald Moore. They travelled by car over broken roads through ruined towns. On July 27, 1945, they played for survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which British troops had liberated in April. Among the audience was the cellist Anita Lasker, who had survived Auschwitz and Belsen and later recalled the concert vividly.
For Menuhin, a Jewish musician who had been spared the persecution suffered by the people in front of him, it was a confrontation with the full scale of the Nazi crimes, and it deepened his sense that a musician’s life carried social as well as artistic duties.
The work of reconciliation
In 1947 Menuhin returned to Berlin to play concertos with the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler, becoming the first Jewish musician to perform with them after the Holocaust. He also gave concerts both for Jews still living in displaced persons camps and for ordinary Germans. It was deeply controversial. Some Jewish refugees in the camps were angered, many Jews found his rapprochement with Germany hard to accept, and Israeli opinion about him remained divided for years. Menuhin acknowledged that he and his family had been spared and that the bitterness of the victims was justified, but argued that the past must never be forgotten while the future still had to be built.
He defended Furtwängler, who had stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi years, against colleagues who boycotted him, pointing out that the conductor had helped a number of Jewish musicians escape, and he went on to make celebrated recordings with him. This urge to bring opposing sides together became a hallmark of his life. He took a principled stand against apartheid in South Africa and against cultural repression in the Soviet Union. When Israel awarded him the Wolf Prize in 1991, he used his acceptance speech in the Knesset to criticise the occupation of the West Bank, calling the treatment of a dependent people unworthy of “my great people, the Jews.” He sponsored the 1950 Peoples’ World Convention in Geneva alongside Albert Einstein, served as president of the International Music Council from 1969 to 1975, during which it launched International Music Day on October 1, and in 1992 was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.
Bringing music to those who need it most
Menuhin’s most lasting gift to the world is a set of institutions that carry music to people who would otherwise go without it. In 1977 he and his friend Ian Stoutzker founded Live Music Now in Britain, with two aims: to bring live music to those who need it most, and to give paid work to talented young musicians at the start of their careers. Its musicians, chosen by audition and trained for the work, perform and lead workshops in care homes, hospitals, hospices, special schools, refugee centres and prisons. By 2016 it reported reaching more than 120,000 people a year in the United Kingdom, and a sister organisation founded in Germany in 1992 now has branches across Germany and Austria. Menuhin believed that music could comfort, heal and bring delight to people cut off from it by illness, disability or circumstance.
In 1993, with Werner Schmitt and Marianne Poncelet, he created MUS-E, a programme that sends professional artists into primary schools, mostly in disadvantaged and multicultural neighbourhoods across Europe, to work alongside teachers in music, singing, dance and the visual arts. Built on the idea of the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály that music belongs in every child’s daily education, it is coordinated by the International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation in Brussels. In the 2024–25 school year it worked in nearly five hundred schools in thirteen countries, reaching more than sixty thousand children.
Teaching the next generations
Menuhin, who never went to school himself, founded one. The Yehudi Menuhin School, established in 1963 and based at Stoke d’Abernon in Surrey, takes musically gifted children from around the world for training in string instruments and piano alongside a full academic education. From the start it aimed to admit pupils on talent alone, with parents paying according to their means, and most pupils today are supported by government grants and bursaries. He also founded the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad, Switzerland, in 1957, directed the Bath Festival from 1959 to 1968, and in 1983 launched the Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists, which has helped start the careers of violinists such as Tasmin Little, Nikolaj Znaider and Julia Fischer.
He was an unusually open-minded musician. He performed and recorded with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar, winning a Grammy Award for their album West Meets East, made popular recordings with the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and helped introduce the yoga teacher B. K. S. Iyengar to audiences in Europe. For him all these were part of one idea: music was a shared human heritage, not the property of one culture or class.
Honours, family and final years
Menuhin married twice. With his first wife, Nola Nicholas, he had two children, Krov and Zamira; after their divorce in 1947 he married the British ballerina Diana Gould, with whom he had two sons, Gerard and Jeremy. He made his homes in London and Switzerland, became a Swiss citizen in 1970 and a British citizen in 1985, and received the Order of Merit in 1987. In 1993 he was made a life peer as Baron Menuhin of Stoke d’Abernon, choosing the name of the village where his school stands. He was also honoured with the Kennedy Center Honors, the Wolf Prize and the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, shared with Mstislav Rostropovich.
He kept performing and conducting into his eighties. He died in Berlin, while on tour, on March 12, 1999, aged 82, of complications of bronchitis, and he was buried in the grounds of the school he had founded. His legacy lives on in a vast body of recordings and, more tangibly, in the musicians his school and competition have trained, and in the care home residents, hospital patients, prisoners and schoolchildren who still hear live music through the organisations he started.
Sources & further reading
Yehudi Menuhin: Violinist & Visionary, Jonathan Benthall, Menuhin Centenary · Live Music Now celebrates the Menuhin Centenary, Live Music Now (2016) · MUS-E Programme, International Yehudi Menuhin Foundation · Britten and Menuhin at Bergen-Belsen, Britten Pears Arts · Yehudi Menuhin, Wikipedia · Yehudi Menuhin, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.