In Detail

"It also provoked a maelstrom of protest from Menuhin aficionados as well as from many members of the Menuhin family, especially Lady Diana and Yehudi himself who, according to his daughter-in-law, “was determined to sue Channel Four for having shown the film”. To say that the family was not pleased by the result is an understatement.

Yehudi even tried to prevent publication of the subsequent book, which was based on the film, threatening Weidenfeld and Nicholson, the original publisher, with an injunction issued by that grand panjandrum Lord Goodman. He, or his representatives, also pursued the film wherever and whenever a broadcast was scheduled, although always without success, claiming that both the film and the book were “so distorted as amounting to a travesty.” According to The Mail on Sunday, Yehudi had only reluctantly agreed to take part in the film. Actually, the idea had come from both Yehudi himself and his daughter by his first marriage, Zamira. If anyone was reluctant, it was me, having been warned repeatedly by various relations of hers how vindictive Lady Menuhin could be if something didn’t please her.

Richard Ingrams wrote in The Independent that the film and the book were “a disservice to music and musician”, and that “my ignorance of the classical music scene (was) glaringly apparent.” Yehudi himself was interviewed by Lynn Barber in The Independent on Sunday, 16 December 1990. He said, “Palmer has his own professional deformity”, although Barber does get Yehudi to admit that the film does not ‘fake’ (his word) anything. In the same article, Yehudi’s wife, Diana, said the film was “a hatchet job”. She later threatened to kill me; but her sister Griselda Kentner wrote to me saying that I should take heart by this reaction. “They are Sir Hypocrite and Lady Monologue”, she told me. “(I) had the story spot on, witnessed by the fact that some of the family had responded with such fury. I never thought I would live to see the truth spelled out so clearly and so movingly”, she wrote.

Yehudi Menuhin was the most famous violinist of his day. Acclaimed a ‘second Mozart’ as a young boy, he toured the capitals of Europe and America, astounding audiences with the extraordinary profundity of his playing. Yet, in the 1940s, after the collapse of his first marriage and the horrors of World War II, Menuhin’s playing seemed to lose its magic. His conducting showed that he was still a powerful interpreter, but the violin was no longer ‘his friend’. In this highly controversial film, I began to investigate the background to the Menuhin story and strip away many of the Menuhin myths which had built up during his career. Far from having a ‘golden childhood’, as Menuhin often claimed, family life was tense and troubled.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Menuhin himself, his wife and his surviving sister and children, I hoped to bring us into the presence of Menuhin’s overpowering personality, his electrifying talent and his missionary zeal. But a zeal achieved at what cost, to himself, his family and above all his art? In his lifetime, Menuhin captivated millions; but, as he says himself, “It’s time it all came out”.

“You will come away from these utterly fascinating two hours shaking from the emotional impact of its revelations”, Jerry Kruppnick wrote in the New York Star; “wondering how a filmmaker could capture and integrate this complex material. This is an extraordinary family portrait. It brings tears to our eyes. Just the glorious music alone is worth watching of this eye-and and-ear-boggling film”.

- Tony Palmer

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