Yogi BKS Iyengar helped virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin turn world of music on its head

ALL around the world today millions of people in Lycra will roll out their yoga mats, oblivious of the role that violinist Yehudi Menuhin (left) played in bringing the ancient practice of yoga to the West.

Violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin playing violin in Paris 1944. 1940s historical

ALL around the world today millions of people in Lycra will roll out their yoga mats, oblivious of the role that Yehudi Menuhin played in bringing the ancient practice of yoga to the West.

Violin virtuoso Menuhin was born 100 years ago today in New York City, quickly earning world fame as a violin prodigy.

By the time of his death in 1999, Menuhin had created a monumental legacy of musical recordings and humanitarian deeds including a program to bring live classical music
to prisons, hospitals and people with disabilities.

It is little-known that Menuhin discovered yoga in his middle 30s and would credit its daily practise with bringing balm to the pain caused by playing so much violin, and curing
him of sleeplessness.

Yoga, he would say, is “my best violin teacher”.

The young child prodigy, Yehudi Menuhin performing in 1927

Menuhin’s first came into contact with yoga when he saw a book about it in the waiting room of a New Zealand doctor.

In 1952, during a concert tour in India, he met yoga guru BKS Iyengar who taught him yoga and became a lifelong guide and friend.

In 1953, Life magazine printed a photographic essay under the heading Yehudi’s Yoga, showing
the violinist in various yoga poses, including one where he is standing on his head.

“He wryly recommends this pose for orchestra conductors because then ‘they could conduct with their feet and still face the audience which is so dear to them’,” Life reported.

In fact, Menuhin did just that in 1982 when he famously conducted the Berlin Philharmonic with his feet while standing on his head.

Menuhin’s devotion to yoga was a daily familiarity to violinist Daniel Hope, who has just released a CD of music in commemoration of the master’s centenary today.

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in a yoga headstand in 1982. Picture: Getty

Hope’s mother Eleanor Hope was Menuhin’s secretary and manager for 24 years. She sat by Menuhin’s hospital bedside when he died in 1999.

Hope says he remembers clearly how Menuhin would practise his yoga. But Menuhin never attempted to force yoga on anyone else.

“He would just offer it as a possibility and very often one was taken in by it because he was so charismatic,” Hope says. “What I did do, though, was the Alexander Technique, because that was something he was fascinated in. He had many students do it. I did some of it and I found it incredibly helpful just being a musician to do that.”

Hope was two years old when his mother started working for Menuhin. While she helped Menuhin run his complex life, Hope would play. They were most often in Menuhin’s homes in London and the Swiss town of Gstaad.

But Hope was surrounded by violinists, conductors and music, and unsurprisingly he decided from an early age to become a violinist himself. Menuhin encouraged him, Hope proved to be brilliant, and the pair would go on to perform in 60 concerts together all over the world.

Hope was 25 when Menuhin died, just days after the last concert they ever performed together. It was in Dusseldorf.

Violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin performing at Sydney Opera House in 1973.

“What was unusual (that night) was that he would always ask me to play an encore after the concerto, but he would usually leave the stage for that,” Hope says.

“And on that particular evening, for whatever reason, he didn’t leave the stage. He sat among the orchestra. So it was a particular gesture, and that’s why I decided to play something different to what I’d been playing every night.

“I’d been playing Bach usually as the encore, and I decided to play this Kaddish of Ravel.

“I thought I would play it that night, just to say ‘thank you’, really. But there’s a deeper context to the piece because the Kaddish is also the prayer for the dead.

“But I didn’t choose it for that reason, I chose it because the music is absolutely magnificent and it was really a kind of gesture back to him.”

Having said goodbye to Menuhin after that concert, Hope never saw him again.

Yehudi Menuhin, a year before his death in 1999.

Hope plays the Kaddish on the Deutsche Grammophon CD titled My Tribute to Yehudi Menuhin. His memories of Menuhin are warm and reverential.

“One of the first things he said to my mother was ‘pack your things, we’re going to the Swiss Alps’,” Hope says.

“She said, ‘I have two young kids, I can’t’. And he said, ‘no, no, you misunderstand me. I would never separate a mother from her children. Bring the whole family’.”

Oddly, the first orchestra Hope ever heard was the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. Hope will become music director of the very same orchestra in September this year.

Yehudi Menuhin’s influence lives on.

Originally published as Yogi BKS Iyengar helped virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin turn world of music on its head