51 QUATUOR YSAŸE Beethoven proposes a new kind of introspection, examining his soul, which gleams like the outrenoir (beyond black) of Pierre Soulages’s paintings. Renouncing his career as a pianist, he turned to a new form of inner listening. Disconnecting himself from the immediate, ephemeral world, he found the entry point to a shifting eternity. The unwitting victim of the lead his body had ingested, he performed an alchemical transmutation inside that afflicted body – it now yielded gold, immaterial gold that proved ‘more precious than gold that perisheth’. And the Quatuor Ysaÿe grants us access to this ineffable offering.
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