![]() ![]() Beyond all this, he was one of the greatest violinists of his era – of any era – playing with supreme musicality and with an unsurpassed sweetest of tone. ![]() He was equally at home talking to royalty and leading politicians as he was with the man in the street or the audience in the concert hall. Photographed, filmed and interviewed almost daily since his early teens, he strode the world stage in a unique manner. Yehudi was 'green' before the term was invented (he was one of the first people in England to have an electric car) and he was into 'World' and 'Crossover' Music before the terms had been coined – performing with the likes of Ravi Shankar and Stéphane Grappelli. However, the Yehudi Menuhin whom I knew was no saint simply a great and an incredibly hard-working musician who cared passionately about the world – its environment, its societies and its politics. ![]() After a moment's reflection Ingrams replied, 'Mother Teresa and Yehudi Menuhin'! At one of the libel trials of the notoriously satirical magazine Private Eye, Richard Ingrams, who was editor at the time, was asked by the judge if there were any public figures that his 'tawdry journal' would not lampoon. In his old age, Menuhin had a reputation of being a calm, meditative, spiritual sage – a man of grace and kindness. The service was clearly Jew-ish, if somewhat unconventional. Rabbi David Goldberg, then of St John's Wood Liberal Synagogue, officiated and the Kaddish prayer was included in the ritual. My eulogy was performed at the service along with music by Bach and Schubert. Honouring his wishes, his family chose to inter him in the school grounds, next to the tree that he planted on his eightieth birthday and not far from the River Mole. He had written that he would like to be buried by a tree and a river. Indeed, after he died early in 1999, I was involved in organizing his funeral. I got to know Menuhin and his family quite well over that period and worked particularly closely with him in the last year of his life. I was Director of Music at The Yehudi Menuhin School in England for nineteen years from 1998 – 2017, and worked at the school on and off for forty years, starting as a young composition teacher in 1997. ![]()
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