Prince Nikolay Borisovich Golitsïn After Prince Razumovky's quartet was disbanded in 1814, Schuppanzigh spent some years in Russia and introduced Beethoven's more recent compositions to music lovers there. Among them was Prince Nikolay Borisovich Golitsïn (1794–1866), a keen amateur cellist and composer, who would become one of Beethoven's most enthusiastic admirers: ‘Je lui ai trouvé cette Sublimité qui préside à toutes vos Compositions’, he told Beethoven in a letter written in November 1823; ‘et qui rendent vos œuvres inimitables.’ The Prince was clearly a man of action as well as words and, not content with ordering a pre-publication score of the Missa Solemnis and persuading the Tsar to subscribe to this ‘trésor de beauté’, he organized the first complete performance of the Mass in St Petersburg on 7 April 1824.

However, his most enduring contribution to the history of music was the fateful letter he had written two years earlier in November 1822, asking Beethoven to compose ‘one, two or three new quartets’ and to name his price. Beethoven, who was already considering a successor to the F minor Quartet, op. 95, agreed at once, but he still had to complete the Missa Solemnis and was about to embark on the Ninth Symphony, which would occupy most of his time over the next two years, so suggested deadlines came and went and financial confusion of one kind or another followed.

Nonetheless, three of the highest pinnacles in music, the three string quartets dedicated to the Prince – op. 127, op. 132 and op. 130 – were eventually scaled, soon followed by arguably the greatest of them all, the Quartet in C sharp minor, op. 131, and finally by the beautiful, though underrated, Quartet in F major, op. 135. The original finale to op. 130, the Grosse Fuge, was published separately as op. 133 and dedicated to Archduke Rudolph. Many years after Beethoven's death, there would be a touching end to the Golitsïn–Beethoven saga, when the Prince's son, the conductor and composer Yuri Nikolayevich Golitsïn, presented a substantial donation to Beethoven's heirs ‘as a token of the admiration which Russian musicians felt for his music’.