`Menuhin at 60" went the headlines. And then "Menuhin at 70". This reporter conducted an interview with the apparently indestructible maestro on the occasion of "Menuhin at 75" in 1991. By 1996 it was "Menuhin at 80", increasingly frail, increasingly - so they said - eccentric, but still feisty enough to add another few chapters to his already bulky biography.
It was a performance of extraordinary longevity, given that 76 years ago, when he was just seven, Yehudi Menuhin startled one of America's most sophisticated musical audiences by his effortless rendition, with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, of Mendelssohn's virtuoso violin concerto. Yesterday, however - after he had arrived in Berlin to conduct the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra in a programme of music by Brahms and Mendelssohn - the music came to an abrupt halt. Following a heart attack brought on by a bout of bronchitis, Yehudi Menuhin died in hospital.
He was born in New York in April 1916 of Russian Jewish parents. His introduction to the violin was inauspicious: given a toy instrument as a birthday gift, the terrible toddler smashed it on the floor in disgust when he found that, instead of "singing", it merely issued unappealing squeaks. His parents hastily substituted a proper violin, and a prodigy was born. By the time he was 12 he had played at Carnegie Hall and won accolades in Berlin, Paris and London.
In one famous incident, at a concert in Berlin a few days short of his 13th birthday, Albert Einstein followed Menuhin backstage, hugged him and declared: "Now I know there is a God in heaven!" He was admired by fellow musicians of the order of Arturo Toscanini, Sir Edward Elgar (the latter described the seven-year-old Menuhin as "the most wonderful artist I have ever heard") and the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, who wrote a violin sonata specially for him.
Dublin audiences, too, had their chance to applaud as he played here on at least two occasions; at the Theatre Royal in 1953, he gave a recital of Bach, Franck and Mendelssohn with the accompanist Gerald Moore at the piano, and in 1964 he performed the Beethoven violin concerto with the thenRadio Eireann Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Tibor Paul.
Those who saw the young Menuhin perform were often struck by the contrast between his gawky appearance and old-fashioned, Little Lord Fauntleroy-style stage outfits and the sublime maturity of his music-making. But life as a child prodigy wasn't always a bundle of laughs. On one occasion the young soloist fell asleep during the long orchestral introduction to the first movement of the Beethoven violin concerto. "Children can get very sleepy if they keep late nights, and of course travelling adds to this," Menuhin recalled many years afterwards. "But I woke up in time. It would have made a far better story had I really stayed asleep and waited for some other violinist to come in."
As always in the dog-eat-dog world of classical music, there were those who had their doubts about the Menuhin miracle; one commentator remarked after a typically precocious performance that "it was almost creepy, like monkeys typing Hamlet". There were - and still are - those who quibbled with his technique. But as the wunderkind grew older, he confounded the sceptics, retaining his idiosyncratic purity of tone but adding an emotional mastery and depth of interpretation which marked him out as a violinist of the first rank.
Many of his recordings - which are doubtless being repackaged and hastily reissued at this very moment - remain in the "highly recommended" bracket, modern digital recording techniques notwithstanding. His 1966 recording of the Elgar violin concerto, in particular, would be worth seeking out and dusting off: "Here was a work which the insular English thought was not only something requiring mature adult feeling, but peculiarly English and probably not understood by even the best foreigners. And here was this New York Jewish kid playing it better, and far more in sympathy with the composer, than any English violinist," was how Charles Acton summed it up in this newspaper.
In fact Yehudi Menuhin took on a distinctly English tinge as his life progressed. After a relatively brief first marriage to the daughter of an Australian patent medicine millionaire, he married Diana Rosamund Gould, an actress and ballerina, with whom he had two children. He founded a music school in Surrey in 1963, acquired British citizenship in 1985, was knighted two years later, and became Baron Menuhin of Stoke d'Abernon in 1993. He held honorary doctorates from a clutch of British universities and was a member of the Order of Merit, an honour which is not only bestowed for life but is restricted to two dozen people at any one time.
THE FISTFULS of honours which were heaped upon him by governments and music academies, however, paled beside the genuine - and lasting - adoration of concert-goers everywhere. Menuhin's name on a programme was always enough to sell out a concert instantly, his tireless work for charitable causes made him the object of considerable affection on the international scene and his productive six-disc partnership with the jazz violinist Stephane Grapelli brought him to a wide popular audience, though he always maintained that he never quite had the "knack" of improvising.
Unlike many musicians who began life as child prodigies, he had a breathtakingly wide palette of interests; somebody once said of him that if he toured the Arctic he would return with a trunkful of ethnographic tabulations, the sketch for an improved system of Eskimo shorthand and the manuscript of a lecture detailing the nutritional deficiencies of the barren-ground caribou.
When I spoke to Yehudi Menuhin on the occasion of his 75th birthday, it was like turning on a tap; he talked fluidly and fluently for over an hour about everything from Brazilian folk music through disease, famine and the free market, to the topic of average wind speeds during the past decade. And music, of course. "Music," he said at one point, "is a curious art because it takes time; you can come back to a painting or a sculpture, you can look at it for a long or a short time, but with music you really have to live through the piece and that's something which demands complete concentration. I don't think you can have the fifth symphony of Beethoven in 20 seconds. It just doesn't make sense - you have to live it.
"We think we can compress everything; because we can turn the film backwards or chop the recording, we think we can do the same with life." Not always, alas. As a marvellous musician and a marvellous human being, he will be greatly missed.