The Human Touch

LAST Sunday evening, for the first time in my life, I heard Yehudi Menuhin play the fiddle. I had been promising myself this treat for a long time, if only to be able to say “Yes!” to that incredulous inquiry: “What, you haven’t heard Yehudi Menuhin!” And Sunday evening I filled a cultural gap in my life besides having the satisfaction of hearing a master violinist play masterfully. Now, even if I never hear him again I shall be able to hold up my head and say that I, too, have heard Master Menuhin play. Indeed, having heard both Professor Einstein and Master Menuhin play, not to mention Zimbalist, Elman, Heifetz and Seidel and a half a dozen other fiddlers, I can turn to the ‘cello.

But to return to the young master: I have never heard a violinist extract such ecstacy with so little effort, so little mannerism, in so almost casual and matter-of-fact way. If you could have been so insensitive as to have stopped your ears and just looked at the manner of his playing you would have supposed that he was doing some routine scraping on an expensive instrument, for one could see that it was a precious fiddle. It is perhaps unfair to compare the fiddling of a mathematician with the fiddling of a virtuoso who solves mathematical puzzles in his spare time, but what can fairly be said in comparison is that the mathematician, when he fiddles, has as few mannerisms as the virtuoso.

But when we contrast, in the playing of Menuhin, the exquisiteness of the performance, of the note produced, with the apparent casualness of the physical effort producing it, I, for one, cannot help but conclude that Master Menuhin must draw upon some good angel, some power outside of himself which showers him with understanding and with capacity to express and to interpret, without his having to trouble himself about the source. The only trouble with that explanation is that it converts Master Menuhin into an instrument himself, and takes away from him the glories of his achievement.

THAT MIXED UP FEELING

And no one would want to do that, He is not the kind of person to whom you would grudge anything. With all his masterly achievement, he looks so genuinely boyish, and almost helpless one might say, that he engenders among the older people in the audience a diffused desire to protect him. He has only one mother and one father, but the sight of his sturdy figure awakes something like a sense of maternity and paternity in men and women who are perhaps old enough merely to be elder brothers and sisters. I know that, in the upper box in which I sat, Yehudi’s playing elicited in the old woman to my right and in the young girl to my left a mother-sister feeling, a feeling which I know got tangled up in the applause which greeted the closing of every number on the program. So that even had Yehudi played less well than he did, the applause would have been only slightly diminished that evening. There is no escaping the fact that you listen with different ears to the playing of a bald-headed veteran than to that of a blonde-headed lad at the door of manhood.

In a lower right box so that from his position Yehudi could see them within the flutter of an eyelid sat Mrs. Menuhin, the mother of the boy wonder, and the girls, Yehudi’s sisters, Yaltah and Hepzibah, and a cousin, a young woman. The three girls, occupying the first row of the box, made a pleasant, but none the less definite, blotch of pink. That first row of that box at least made only a polite show of applause, except at the very end, even when the galleries thundered their approbation.

CLUMPS OF STANDEES

Every seat in the great hall was occupied and there were clumps of standees in the family circle and dress circle, orchestra and second tier boxes. One wondered, looking at that vast crowd, whether anyone was listening to any other concert in New York that evening. The stage itself was crowded with sitters who could stand the price. In fact there were so many stage sitters that they almost surrounded the piano on three sides. And at the end of the program, there was a rush of feet down the aisles of the orchestra, the feet of the loyal standees, who were as vigorous in applause as they had been patient on their feet. These demanded encores and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Yehudi played three encores and the evening was over.

Not that I enjoyed Menuhin as soloist less, but I would have enjoyed him more with an orchestra as background. I am very much afraid that even a genius of the violin as he is cannot make that instrument less thin than it normally is, by itself. For one who is, like myself, neither violinist nor critic, two solid hours of violin music, no matter how much the violinist may do with his instrument. is a trial. The man next to the woman at my left was frank enough to snatch a snooze, and there were difficult moments when I was sorely tempted. Perhaps I had better not say any more, for fear of bringing down a clamor of abuse from the Menuhinites.

NO, I DID NOT

I have been informed, and this in dead seriousness, that I addressed a birth control meeting the other evening. Now I ought to know something about what I do and where I go and what I say where I go, and I give you my solemn word that I not only did not address a birth control meeting, I did not attend one. I did not attend any meeting. Not for weeks and weeks. For all you know, I may not even believe in birth control, whatever my practice may be.

I cannot imagine that anyone would be so absurd as to take the trouble of posing as Harry Salpeter. I rather think it is impossible to pose as Harry Salpeter. Either you are Harry Salpeter, as I am, or you are not, and that’s that. This is being written on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 20. Tonight, if all goes well (meaning Tuesday) I attend the Musical Quartet performance at Town Hall; last night (Monday) I retired at an early hour; Sunday night I heard Menuhin; Saturday night I attended a little gathering given by a Bulletin subscriber; Friday evening I heard Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan; Thursday evening I was aboard the S.S. Pulaski, of the Gdynia-America Line, and Wednesday, that is March 14, I again retired early. So how could I have been at a birth control meeting, or any kind of meeting? This just shows you how stories get around about a fellow.

PLATO IN HEBREW

Plato’s “Theaetetus,” the latest publication in the philosophical classics of the Hebrew University Press, translated for the first time in Hebrew, has just appeared. The series is edited by Professor Leon Roth of the Department of Philosophy.