Yehudi Menuhin, a child of impoverished immigrant parents who moved to California when he was at a young age, recounts his life as a child prodigy in his autobiography An Unfinished Journey. His interesting and well told story brings us into the world of classical music and those who work in it. Not only do we glimpse Menuhin’s remarkable life, but we also get a feel for what it is like to be a concert musician on tour. This paper will discuss the life and accomplishments of Yehudi Menuhin as it is presented in his autobiography An Unfinished Journey.
Menuhin begins his book as a man looking back on the past he has traversed. He notes that while his life choices are his own, there were many factors outside of him that contributed to his success. One, if not the most important, “happy accident” of his life was his family. He admits immediately that “Much of my life’s design was laid before I was born” (Menuhin 3). Menuhin was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants and he attributes his success not only to the genius he was endowed with at birth, but his family’s nurturing of his genius. Indeed, his parents played an integral role in the raising of him and his sisters: “My mother was twenty, my father twenty-three when they began, with my arrival, to subordinate their own interests to their children’s. . . . Twice my father was to abandon a career on my account--in 1917 when he forsook his university studies to earn his family’s livelihood teaching Hebrew, and again ten years later when he gave up education to manage my concerts. Small wonder if I feel with much gratitude and no little guilt that my fulfillment has been gained at the cost of theirs” (Menuhin 11).
While ordinary people are plagued with the inability to decide what it is they want to do in life, Menuhin knew at a remarkably early age that he wanted to play the violin. It is difficult for a person of rather ordinary intelligence t...