Yehudi Menuhin Quotes

There comes a time when the student turns his back on the teacher. His playing cannot have the necessary security, autonomy, self-faith, or communicative power until he believes his interpretation is his own.

It wasn't enough to be a great soloist - Menuhin wanted to be a great leader in music. He wanted to teach, open a music school and conduct the world's best musical groups. Menuhin knew that if he wanted to teach a class or lead an orchestra, he couldn't rest on his past achievements. He needed to understand the steps he'd taken to play so well.

The world has lost a great soul, whose passion was music and humanity.

Now I know there is a God in heaven.

So back to school he went. To nail down the way his fingers moved, Menuhin learned every scale imaginable. He learned to play them at every speed. He searched the library for books on violin technique. He went to the best teachers and asked them to explain things the books didn't say. He asked gymnasts and dancers for advice on the most precise way to move his bowing arm. To understand how to control his bowing better, he learned the names of each muscle in the back, upper arms, forearms and fingers. He studied drawings made by Leonardo da Vinci, so he'd know what hands looked like on the inside. Then Menuhin broke his performance down even more. Studying India's exercise system of yoga, he started to understand his breathing as he played.

It is absolutely vital to hold it as lightly as possible - rather as one might pick up a newborn bird.

I would hate to think I am not an amateur. An amateur is one who loves what he is doing. Very often, I'm afraid, the professional hates what he is doing. So, I'd rather be an amateur.

The teacher offers guidance here and there, but the primary factor, the driving force, in your relationship and work together is the student's own commitment and desire to learn. Teaching is like sailing: The wind and the sails give the boat its motion. Your role (as a teacher) is to steer and guide.

[At age 7] In eight hours of concentrated practice between my twice-weekly lessons, I memorized the A major and played it for Persinger.

Despite the adulation that followed him wherever he went, Menuhin's playing began to lose some of its technical brilliance in the 1950s and entered a slow decline. But Menuhin, who often appeared transfixed when he performed, readily made up for what a Times critic described as "thick-toned, raspy playing" with an increased spiritual intensity in his interpretation.

He was never just a musician, from very early on he wanted to do other things, to make his music work for humanity.

Each human being has the eternal duty of transforming what is hard and brutal into a subtle and tender offering, what is crude into refinement, what is ugly into beauty, ignorance into knowledge, confrontation into collaboration, thereby rediscovering the child’s dream of a creative reality incessantly renewed by death, the servant of life, and by life the servant of love.

He was one of the celebrities like author Aldous Huxley who was taught by B. K. S. Iyengar the Iyengar brand of yoga.

What guides us is children's response, their joy in learning to dance, to sing, to live together. It should be a guide to the whole world.

His musical career spanned more than seven decades. He made his debut in San Francisco as a child prodigy aged seven and by the age of 13, had performed in London, Paris and Berlin. He went on to develop his talents as a violinist, conductor and teacher, founding the Yehudi Menuhin School, in Surrey, for gifted young musicians in 1963. [...] At the age of 16 the young violinist was conducted by Sir Edward (Elgar) in a now famous recording of the composer's violin concerto, made in 1932.