LDV77

DAVID GRIMAL 25 Ysaÿe’s career spans the period from the 1880s to the 1930s, the equivalent of two generations. He knew and frequented musicians as remote from each other in our imagination as Clara Schumann and Debussy. How would you characterise his musical universe and that of his Six Sonatas? When he wrote the Six Sonatas in 1923, he was sixty-five years old. He had carried them inside him all his life. They constitute his legacy to the history of violin literature. They are the synthesis of his musical career and an opening to the future through the new playing techniques he invented, which were to be exploited by many composers in the following decades. The more one works on these sonatas, the more one admires the symbiosis between the art of the violinist and that of the composer. They are written using the instrumental vocabulary developed since Giovanni Battista Viotti by generations of violinists, including Rode, Dont, Marsick, Sarasate, Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps, the last two of whom were his teachers. Ysaÿe was at the intersection of the paths that were to lead to the golden age of the violin as we know it, thanks to the fabulous recordings made in the twentieth century. It is important to understand that Ysaÿe lived in a period of effervescence. He was at the centre of a circle of composers who dedicated works to him: Debussy, Chausson, Lekeu, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Jongen, Franck, Vierne among others. But he was also linked with a world that was then thought to be more old- fashioned: that of the violinist Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann, whom he met when he was Konzertmeister of the orchestra at the Berlin Konzerthaus in the 1880s.