Again paralleling Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s final manner consists in portraying Christ as the sign of an invisible God. The features are blurred, and a constant interplay of light and shadow reveals what seems impossible to represent. This was a period of the ultimate audacity for Beethoven, who completely dynamited the existing framework of the quartet, immersing himself in an act of inner listening, just as Rembrandt contemplates invisible light. Beethoven here approaches silence. He is at the epicentre, in the eye of the storm, moving in ineffable murmurs towards fertile silence. This is perhaps one of the finest achievements of the Quatuor Ysaÿe – to make us hear that silence, so different from the empty silence of death, the silence of exhaustion and of soil dried up. Their deliberate maintenance of a coherent line from op.18 onwards allows us to observe this evolution, to perceive everything that, contained in promises or flashes of genius at the start of the cycle, so magisterially unfolds at the end. 49 QUATUOR YSAŸE
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