Herbert von Karajan and Yehudi Menuhin on the Space Between the Notes

Revised May 21, 2026 | Please note: This article reflects an independent critical perspective and is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by any individuals, organizations, or parties mentioned or referenced herein. 

The conversation between Yehudi Menuhin and Herbert von Karajan appears at first to be a discussion about conducting and orchestral interpretation. In reality, it is a discussion about where music itself comes alive. Both men reject the simple idea that music is contained in the written notes alone. The score gives music its architecture, but performance gives that architecture a living interior.

The exchange came from a filmed collaboration in 1966 around Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5, with Menuhin as soloist and Karajan conducting. The project was directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, who worked with Karajan on a small group of concert films between 1965 and 1967. The official Karajan site lists the 1966 Mozart film with Yehudi Menuhin among those collaborations.

What survives is unusually revealing because it does not show only the polished surface of performance. It shows two major musicians speaking about rehearsal, control, interpretation, and the hidden mechanics by which music passes from notation into sound. Their subject is not simply how to play Mozart correctly. It is how disciplined musicians create something that cannot be completely planned in advance.

By 1966, Menuhin and Karajan had come to represent different possibilities within 20th-century classical music. Menuhin, born in New York in 1916 into a Jewish immigrant family from Eastern Europe, had first become famous as one of the great child prodigies of the violin. American Jewish Archives describes him as a Jewish American violinist and conductor born in New York to Lithuanian immigrants. As a teenager, he recorded Elgar’s Violin Concerto with Elgar himself conducting, a recording that became one of the landmarks of his early career.

Yet Menuhin’s later life moved far beyond virtuosity. During the Second World War, he performed for Allied soldiers. After the war, he and Benjamin Britten played for displaced persons and survivors at Bergen-Belsen; ORT’s Music and the Holocaust records that they gave two concerts at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp on 27 July 1945. That experience belonged to a larger pattern in Menuhin’s life: he increasingly treated music as a form of moral communication, cultural exchange, and repair.

This helps explain why his postwar association with Wilhelm Furtwängler was so charged. Furtwängler had remained a central German conductor during the Nazi period, and his postwar status was bitterly contested. Menuhin’s decision to work with him was controversial, but it also expressed Menuhin’s belief that music could become part of reconciliation after catastrophe.

Karajan represented a different and more ambiguous postwar force. Born in Salzburg in 1908, he became one of the defining conductors of the recording and media age. His long association with the Berlin Philharmonic gave him enormous influence over the sound and public image of orchestral music. The Berliner Philharmoniker describes his tenure as one in which the orchestra developed a distinctive performance culture marked by beauty of sound, legato, virtuosity, perfection, international touring, and extensive sound and film recordings.

Karajan’s postwar position was also morally complicated. He had been a Nazi Party member, and his career before and after the war cannot be separated entirely from the political history around him. That fact does not cancel the musical importance of the 1966 conversation, but it does make the exchange more historically charged. The conversation is not only between two celebrated musicians. It is also between figures carrying very different relationships to the ruins and reconstruction of European musical life after the war.

That history should not be allowed to disappear behind the beauty of the recordings. At the same time, the 1966 conversation is not mainly about political biography. Its value lies in showing how a conductor often associated with polish, control, and perfection spoke about the limits of control itself.

This is where Menuhin and Karajan unexpectedly converge. Menuhin speaks partly as a violinist who is learning to conduct. He describes conducting as a liberation from the narrow physical world of the fingerboard. Conducting expands the musician’s attention from one instrumental line to the whole structure of the music. Yet he approaches the role with humility, openly aware that conducting requires a kind of authority different from solo playing.

Karajan speaks from the opposite position: decades of experience shaping large orchestral systems. He understands the need for discipline, rehearsal, and certainty. A conductor cannot lead an orchestra through vagueness. Musicians may forgive many things, but uncertainty destroys trust. The conductor must communicate not only beat and tempo, but conviction, direction, and a shared idea of the work.

Yet Karajan also insists that control is not the essence of music. Rehearsal can prepare the conditions for performance, but it cannot manufacture the highest moments directly. Those moments often happen when a phrase bends slightly, when a musician reacts differently in concert, when the orchestra senses the change and moves with it. A performance that is too rigid may be accurate, but dead. A performance that is too loose may be free, but incoherent.

This is the central paradox of the article. Great performance requires discipline strong enough to hold many players together, but flexible enough to let something unforeseen happen. Too little structure produces disorder. Too much structure produces sterility. The orchestra must live in the narrow zone where precision enables freedom rather than replacing it.

That balance is not mystical. It is built through rehearsal. The musicians are not merely memorizing instructions or obeying a conductor mechanically. They are learning how to listen together: how to enter, withdraw, support, breathe, balance, and respond. Over time, the orchestra develops a common internal language. Many separate people begin to act like one responsive body.

This is why the image of a flock of birds matters. Karajan describes a form of unity in which the group seems to move together without visible command. The point is not that no leadership exists. The point is that leadership has become internalized. The players have rehearsed enough, listened enough, and trusted enough that response becomes almost immediate. The conductor’s authority remains present, but the music no longer feels pushed from outside. It seems to move from within.

The same idea helps explain why live performance cannot be fully replaced by recording. A recording preserves sound, but it also fixes an event. It makes one version permanently repeatable. A concert remains exposed to uncertainty. It may fail. It may rise beyond expectation. The audience senses that the performance is happening under real conditions, in real time, among people who must keep listening to one another.

Small changes therefore matter. A hesitation, a phrase held slightly longer, a softened attack, a collective breath before an entrance: these are not decorative details. In a tightly coordinated musical system, small variations can alter the emotional meaning of the whole. This is part of what people mean when they say that music lives “between the notes.” They do not mean that the notes are unimportant. They mean that the notes are not enough.

The deeper importance of the Menuhin-Karajan conversation is that it gives a musical form to a wider human problem. Modern institutions often prize precision, predictability, repeatability, and control. These values are necessary. Without them, complex systems collapse. But when a system is optimized only for control, it can lose the very thing that makes it alive: judgment, responsiveness, risk, trust, and discovery.

Music makes that problem audible. The score is necessary, but it does not perform itself. Technique is necessary, but it does not guarantee meaning. Leadership is necessary, but it cannot simply command life into existence. The living part appears when disciplined people share enough structure to risk freedom together.

What Menuhin and Karajan describe is therefore not merely artistic execution. It is collective emergence under conditions of shared risk.

The walls do not create the house; the interior space does. In the same way, technical mastery forms the outer structure of music. The actual meaning lies in what cannot be fully written down: timing, tension, phrasing, collective instinct, emotional direction, and the subtle transfer of intention between musicians. The score gives the music its visible form. The performance gives it breath.

Sources and Further Reading

• Official Karajan Foundation: Karajan, Clouzot, and the concert films. This is the central source for the 1966 Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 film with Yehudi Menuhin.

• American Jewish Archives: Yehudi Menuhin, the Violinist. Used for Menuhin’s biographical background and family-origin wording.

• Strings Magazine: 10 Essential Yehudi Menuhin Recordings. Used for additional context on Menuhin’s major recordings.

• ORT Music and the Holocaust: Belsen DP Camp. Used for the 27 July 1945 Bergen-Belsen concerts by Yehudi Menuhin and Benjamin Britten.

• Britten Pears Arts: Britten and Menuhin at Bergen-Belsen. Used for additional context on the Bergen-Belsen performances.

• Berliner Philharmoniker: Herbert von Karajan. Used for Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic tenure and recording-age role.

• Britannica: Herbert von Karajan. Used for Karajan’s biography, Nazi Party membership, postwar exoneration, and later career.

• ORT Music and the Holocaust: Herbert von Karajan. Used for a more critical account of Karajan’s place in the musical world of the Third Reich.

• WRTI / NPR: Yehudi Menuhin’s potent blend of music, humanism, and politics. Used for Menuhin’s postwar bridge-building, humanitarian work, and later cross-cultural musical activity.

The Film

Here is the Henri-Georges Clouzot 1966 film (43 min) from YouTube:

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