CriticalDance Forum

Two obituaries of Lady Menuhin, who as Diana Gould dance with Ballet Rambert:


Lady Menuhin
Ballerina who gave up her career on the stage for a life devoted to the genius of a great musician. From The Times.


She called her autobiography Fiddler’s Moll, suggesting a carefree, gypsy life, and Diana Menuhin’s was certainly the life of a wanderer — criss-crossing continents, jetting from one capital to the next, meeting kings, presidents and potentates, packing, unpacking and setting up temporary homes across the world as she accompanied, supported, inspired and protected her husband Yehudi. For more than 50 years she was the bedrock on which one of last century’s musical geniuses rested, the devoted partner of a man whose dreamy impracticality and visionary otherwordliness was reined in by a wife whose acerbic common sense and insight into the snares of fame made her a formidable guardian of Yehudi’s talent.

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Lady Menuhin
From The Daily Telegraph

Lady Menuhin, who has died aged 90, was the devoted and fiercely energetic wife of Sir Yehudi (later Lord) Menuhin; for more than 50 years she supported, organised and inspired her husband, enabling him to dedicate his life to music and humanitarian causes.

A striking beauty, Diana Gould (as she then was) had been a talented ballerina when she met Menuhin, four years her junior, in 1945. Menuhin, a former child prodigy, was recovering from the breakdown of his first marriage, which had left him "alone and strangely lost".

They married in 1947, after which she focused her considerable ambition on her husband's career. "If one performing artist marries another," she wrote in her autobiography, Fiddler's Moll, in 1984, "it is obvious that one of the two must dissolve his or her persona in the other."

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A summary of Diana Gould's career in ballet:

- Studied with Rambert and Egorova

- At 13 danced with Diaghalev's Ballets Russes and later was invited to dance with Pavlova, but the death of the latter prevented this.

- As a leading dance with Ballet Rambert, she created roles in:
Leda and the Swan(Ashton, 1928)
Capriol Suite(Ashton, 1930)
The Planets(Tudor, 1934)
Bar aux Folies-Bergere(de Valois, 1934)

and danced in:

L’Après-midi d’un faune (Nijinksky)
Le Carnaval (Fokine)

- Other companies:
Vic-Wells Ballet
Les Ballets 1933
The Markova-Dolin Company
Arts Theatre Ballet
Jay Pomeroy's Russian Opera and Ballet Company

Information primarily from "The Oxford Dictionary of Dance".

<small>[ 01 February 2003, 05:25 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Lady Menuhin
Dancer who enjoyed a considerable ballet career before marrying the violinist Yehudi Menuhin
01 February 2003. From The Independent.

Diana Rosamond Constance Grace Irene Gould, dancer: born London 12 November 1912; married 1947 Yehudi Menuhin (KBE 1965, created 1993 Baron Menuhin, died 1999; two sons, and one child deceased); died London 25 January 2003.

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<small>[ 01 February 2003, 05:26 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Lady Menuhin
Gifted dancer who complemented the life of her brilliant husband. By Humphrey Burton for The Guardian.


Lady Menuhin, the widow of Yehudi Menuhin (obituary, March 13 1999), was a familiar figure in British musical life for more than six decades. Born Diana Gould in upper-crust Belgravia, she died there 90 years later.
Her own medium was dance. Between the ages of nine and 15, she attended Madame Rambert's pioneering ballet classes in Notting Hill, and was soon seen as a rising star - as the critic Arnold Haskell put it, "the most musical young dancer the English dance has produced".

Frederick Ashton created his first ballet, Leda And The Swan, for her in 1928. Serge Diaghilev promptly invited her to join his company; he took to introducing her as "the only young woman I would like to marry". After he died the following year, Diana felt that, as in The Sleeping Beauty, a black fairy had been present at her christening, a view reinforced in 1931, when Anna Pavlova, who had also expressed interest, promptly died of pneumonia.

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