The Menuhins

At 14, Hephzibah Menuhin could have touched the moon. Within easy reach of her talented, chubby fingers glittered bright lights, big money, fame. While brother Yehudi fiddled, she had played brilliant piano. Together they had charmed the major capitals of the world. Critics had glowed over her fleet and clean technique, her vibrant tones.

Then Poppa Menuhin stepped in. Said he implacably: "We have known hundreds of women musicians, and we have never seen a happy one. . . . The first urge of a woman is to have a home. That is what Hephzibah will have." Hephzibah was spirited into the fastness of the Menuhin home in California's Santa Cruz mountains. She kept up her music, emerged only occasionally to accompany Yehudi, who had gone on to greater fame. In 1938 she married Lindsay Nicholas, brother of Yehudi's wife Kola, went off to her husband's 24,000-acre sheep ranch in Australia to fulfill her domestic destiny.

Last week, for the first time since 1938, Hephzibah Menuhin Nicholas, 26, was back in the U.S. Within the week she found she could still touch the moon if she wanted to.

In Dallas, she gave a thrilling, expert performance of Brahms's demanding piano Concerto No. 2. Then, in their first joint recital in nearly seven years, the gifted brother & sister packed Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. Hephzibah was exuberant. The long interval in which she had not played with Yehudi seemed, she said, "just as though we had stopped to go out to lunch."

But now Hephzibah knew she did not want the moon. Said she, while her two children, Kronrod, 7, and Marsten, 2 1/2, gamboled with Yehudi's two children in his Manhattan apartment: "I have no ambitions whatsoever. I have everything that most people want--a wonderful outdoor life and as much culture as is good for me. My husband loves music almost as much as his sheep. We play recordings, listen to broadcasts, enjoy our chamber music with musical neighbors, have lots of musical friends around. On weekends, we pack up and go to the ballet or theater."

Although she had agreed to sail for Europe this week to do a series of concerts with Yehudi, Hephzibah firmly announced that she would be home in Australia by May: "That's the lambing season."

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