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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 March 1999 Issue No. 421 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 March 1999 Issue No. 421
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters By Edward Said 
Music of men's lives
This has been a sad period of deaths and memorials which, in our media driven age, inevitably produce a sudden over-abundance of attention to the departed person, only to leave his or her friends and contemporaries with mournful recollections in an arid aftermath. A few days ago I was at King's College, Cambridge to speak at a memorial service for one of my oldest and dearest friends, Professor Tony Tanner, the founder of American literature studies in England, a great scholar of English literature (including the best book on Jane Austen, and a superb treatment of adultery in the novel, plus a very fine book Venice Desired on images of Venice in Proust, Ruskin, and Thomas Mann among others). He was exactly my age, and we had known each other through crises and high points for 35 years. We shared an abiding interest in Joseph Conrad, an author whose longtime readers and admirers develop a strangely profound bond.
One week later, just as I was about to leave England for a week's lecturing in Palestine, I was stunned to hear that Yehudi Menuhin had suddenly died in Berlin, aged 82. While I cannot say that Menuhin and I were more than acquaintances who had not been in contact for about ten years, the great violinist's death affected me very deeply also. What has prompted this article on Menuhin was that in the great outpouring of lamentations and obituary for Menuhin in the British and American press crucial aspects of his life and career were uniformly ignored or misreported. It is on one such aspect -- Menuhin's complicated relationship as a Jew to Israel -- that I'd like to report on here, as a footnote to all the justified praise that his life, rich in musical and humanitarian accomplishment, has entitled him to.
Yehudi Menuhin at Cairo Opera House during a visit in December 1992
I should mention at the outset that he and I met a few times in London during the late 1980's once at the home of Leila and Abdel-Mohsin Qattan, and once a few months earlier for a late afternoon public discussion between the two of us at the Institute for Contemporary Art (the ICA) on music and other cultures, followed by dinner with members of his family. The idea for discussion was his son-in-law's, who was then the Chairman of the Royal Anthropological Society; he had read Orientalism and thought that given Menuhim's interest in Indian and other world musics, it might be worthwhile for the two of us to discuss the borrowings and cross-fertilising that occurs between Western and non-western music.
I jumped at the occasion of course, having been an admirer of Menuhin's art (I grew up on his legendary recording of the Beethoven violin concerto conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler) and fascinated by his complex personality. Unlike most musicians of his status and age, and although he was basically self-taught outside of music, he had considerable philosophical, social and political interests in addition to his all-consuming passion for music not only as violinist, but also as teacher, conductor and elder statesman. In this he was somewhat like Pablo Casals, although more outspoken and compelling on his public pronouncements and actions on controversial issues. Even though he and the English composer and pianist Benjamin Britten gave 500 concerts in Germany during 1945-6, playing at concentration camps in aid of Jewish victims of the Nazis, he was also the first Jewish musician to play with a German conductor and orchestra in 1947; he was attacked for that, but considered reconciliation and the healing power of music more important than political correctness.
Our discussion and subsequent dinner were magical. I found him to be a worthy, gracious man who despite his great fame and musical renown showed a great interest in what I, as a much younger and less-known person, had to say. We turned out both to take great delight in the borrowings across cultures that frequently occur in music (no clash of civilisations for Menuhin!) and spent a good deal of time discussing Britten's use of Balinese music, or Villa Lobos's (the Brazilian composer) use of Bach in his cello pieces. Menuhin was particularly interested in the relationship between Arabic and Indian music, and specially fascinated by examples I played for him of Arabic adaptations of Mozart and Mendelsohn. For a man in his seventies he had amazing energy: despite the fierce London heat and the immensely stuffy ICA hall we were crowded into with hundreds of listeners he showed no signs of fatigue at all. We parted at midnight after a rousing Chinese dinner.
I think it must have been perhaps a year later that Menuhin was in the news again, this time for what was considered to be a major offence to Israel. When I had met him in London we were too taken up with music to discuss politics, even though of course he knew that I was a politically active Palestinian. His father was Moshe Menuhin, author of a well-known anti-Zionist book, The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, which I had read, but I also knew that Yehudi and his father had long had a difficult relationship for other reasons (the young musical prodigy and his opinionated father had clashed over musical matters), so I never brought up the matter at all. Then suddenly I read in the press that Yehudi Menuhin had won the Israel prize, an annual distinction conferred on a Jew; it was widely considered to be the most prestigious honour awarded to an individual for his services to the world and the Jewish people. With the prize itself, which was given at the Knesset, went the right for the prize winner to make a major address to the Israeli parliament.
What actually happened was quite remarkable. Menuhin's speech to the Knesset amounted to nothing less than a stern sermon to the country to mend its militaristic ways. Those who rule by the sword, he said, shall also perish by it. It is not difficult to imagine what a bombshell this was. Menuhin was no ordinary gifted man. For the better part of 50 years, along with Einstein, he typified genius, more specifically Jewish genius. He had always identified with his people, and had given generously to its welfare. Now, like an Old Testament prophet he was using the discourse of Jewish ethics to indict the behaviour of a state which, he clearly believed, because it was a Jewish state had violated the premises on which it had been based. For him, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians (the Intifada was raging at the time he spoke) symbolised how the Jewish people, as embodied in the country's unrelenting war against another people, had abandoned morality to military power.
The Knesset, and especially Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who had just handed Menuhin the prize, was stunned. As I recall, there was no applause, but Menuhin bravely continued to the end, then made a dignified exit.
Not a single one of the many obituaries that appeared when Menuhin died on 10 March mentioned this quite out of the ordinary episode. It was as if a collective amnesia had gripped the media and the many commentators who supplied millions of words on the man's death. Menuhin's gesture was a rare example of an artist speaking up for what is right at a time when such a gesture was nearly impossible. He had not attacked an easy enemy, or an approved target: quite the reverse, he had publicly denounced his own people as that people was honouring him. This is never easy to do, but to his everlasting credit as a human being and a man of conscience, Menuhin did it.
Some months later at the Qattan house we met to discuss the future of Salim Abboud the extremely gifted Palestinian-Israeli pianist who was then only 14. Menuhin studied a video tape of the boy's playing and immediately accepted him as a student at his school for gifted young musicians in Surrey. There was no pomposity or false posturing to Menuhin. For him music was a part of the humanising process, not just a technical discipline designed to produce soulless virtuosos and mechanical performers, hence the idea of his school. He never restricted himself to music, but ranged all over as an advocate of human generosity, coexistence, and real peace with real justice. Jerusalem, he used to say, should be the shared capital of two peoples. And whereas his death was genuinely mourned and his life celebrated, it was, I think, significant that his extraordinary contribution to justice and truth in Palestine that stands as one of his major accomplishments, one that was left out of his obituaries because Western opinion is still not fully prepared to accept the idea. A great musician, and a great citizen of the world.
