But Beethoven’s greatness lies in the art of arranging contrasts, sometimes brutal ones – an encephalogram of his inner torment? For example, at bar 85 he presents a ‘mineral’ passage that explores combinations of top and bottom registers, like craggy rocks viewed over the course of their long history. The glint resulting from these ages of sedimentation is even more striking in bars 144-151, where the musicians lengthen their bows and add a hint of vibrato in a shared phrasing. After the contemplations of the first violin, which creates a feeling of space through the contrast between the articulation of its phrases of uninterrupted quavers and the increasingly assertive harmonic colours in the sustained notes of the other parts, the music once more becomes amiable, Viennese and ordinarily elegant, before the second part of the development, with a secondary theme treated as a fugato, establishes the mineral order of the pure abstraction cherished by Bach in The Art of Fugue and by Beethoven in the exalted mood of the Grosse Fuge (bar 185). Here, the rhythm becomes quasi-percussive, thanks to the bowstrokes of the cello, in which one can almost hear the compressed air of the attack. 38 BEETHOVEN • THE COMPLETE STRING QUARTETS
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