“The quartet you shall also receive by the middle of October.  Overburdened by work, and suffering from bad health, I really have some claim on the indulgence of others.  I am here on account of my health, or rather to the want of it, although I already feel better.

“Apollo and the Muses do not yet intend me to become the prey of the bony scytheman, as I have yet much to do for you, and much to bequeath, which my spirit dictates and calls on me to complete before I depart hence for the Elysian Fields; I feel as if I had written scarcely more than a few notes.”

The initial performance of the first of the Galitzin Quartets took place in the spring of 1825.  Beethoven regarded the event as a momentous occurrence and required the four performers, Schuppanzich, Weiss, Linke and Holz, to sign a compact, each to “pledge his honor to do his best to distinguish himself and vie with the other in zeal.”

The quartets once begun were carried on with ardor in the midst of most distressing occurrences, chief of which were ill health and its twin demon, poverty, as well as the waywardness of his nephew, all of which tended to draw him to the spiritual life.  The character of Beethoven’s work changed from the period of the Mass in D. An altered condition, an altogether new, different strain is apparent thenceforth.  The deeply religious, mystical character of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony can be attributed to his previous absorption on the Mass.  He worked out of this vein somewhat in the other movements as not being adapted to the uses for which the symphony is designed, but it reappears again in the quartets to the extent of dominating them.

The one in B Flat, opus 130, completes the three for Prince Galitzin.  Of the Cavatina of this quartet, Holz is authority for saying that Beethoven composed it with tears, and confessed that never before had his own music made such an impression on him; that even the repetition of it always cost him tears.  In this movement Beethoven used the word Beklemmt (Beklommen) (oppressed, anxious) at a point where it modulates into another key.  His loneliness, superinduced by his life of celibacy, by his deafness, his disappointment in his nephew, all had the effect of separating him from the world.  The spiritual side of his nature, always active, had been brought into new life during his work on the Mass, as we have seen.  It was never thenceforth allowed to fall into abeyance, but was developed in direct ratio with his withdrawal from the world.  An atavism from some remote Aryan ancestry inclined him, as in the case of so many Germans, to mysticism and the occult.  It was a condition which had its compensations.  That there were periods when he saw visions may be conjectured by the character of the last quartets.  When they were written, Beethoven was in the shadow of death, on the border-land of the other world, and from that proximity he relates his experience.  These works receive the reverence of all musicians for their spirituality, their mysticism, their psychological qualities.  They are the revelations of the seer, awe-inspiring mementos of states and conditions of mind which transcend the experiences of ordinary life.  In these last impassioned utterances of the master, we find a strain holier, more profound, different from anything which the art of music has yet produced.