Word: menuhin
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...Menuhin has kept this respect for the Masters. He studies now only from original texts (in German the Ur-texts), works out by himself the composer's own bowings & markings. When a Swiss doctor was about to remove his appendix, he went under ether asking for the Ur-text of Bach. "Bach alone, unedited," he said, "is so perfect, so satisfying...
...Menuhin hates gushing. A lady once rushed up to him, said: "You play just like Paganini." Menuhin asked her if she had ever heard Paganini. He sees few of his press notices. They are being kept for him until he is 20. Yet once when he happened upon a particularly rhapsodic screed his comment was: "But I have no good spiccato. I have no staccato. I play my double-stops out of tune, my vibrato is bad and my trills terrible...
...hates nothing worse than being called a prodigy, says always: "It's not a question of how young I am." Mischa Elman played in a Lord Fauntleroy suit when he was 17. Menuhin demanded long pants this season, had them made by the tailor to the Italian Crown Prince. He demanded an automobile license, too, last spring, got it in California by taking a test on San Francisco's busy Market Street. That automobile license is his most treasured possession. It is the only thing he keeps in his pocket when he gives a recital...
After a recital Menuhin still asks for a strawberry ice-cream soda, but in Manhattan three years ago he wanted to do something different so his father took him to see his birthplace on University Avenue at 181st Street. He saw the nook under the stairs where his baby-carriage used to stand, the rigging on the firescape where his diapers hung, the grocery next door where a loaf of bread was snatched from his mother's hands because she could not pay immediately...
Yehudi (A Jew) Menuhin was nine months old when the family moved to San Francisco and his father started working as a day-laborer in a lumberyard until he proved himself sufficiently well-educated to get a job teaching in a Hebrew school. Moshe Menuhin and his wife liked to go to symphony concerts but there was no one to leave the baby with. One day they decided to take him with them and strangely enough young Yehudi stayed perfectly quiet. Thereafter he attended the concerts regularly, developed a great interest in Louis Persinger who sat in the first violin...