During the early years of the new century, Beethoven became increasingly impatient with those who could not keep pace with his ideas, among them Haydn. ‘His first works pleased me considerably’, Haydn told Giuseppe Carpani, his first biographer; ‘[but] I must admit that I don't understand the later ones. It seems to me that he continually improvises.’ Partly as a result perhaps, Beethoven became less content with his earlier, more popular music like the Septet, as is shown in his celebrated conversation with Wenzel Krumpholz, quoted above. However, the music he composed during the first three years of the new century – alternating periods of hope and all but total despair as his hearing gradually deteriorated – suggests not so much a single path as a number of new initiatives. Among them was an increased emphasis on such attributes as heroism and courage illustrated, for example, in the first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata (1802–3) or deeply felt emotions and spirituality, as in the slow movement of the Spring Sonata (1800–1801).

Beethoven composed his fourth and fifth violin sonatas during the summer and autumn of 1800 and they were first advertised on 28 October 1801 in the Wiener Zeitung as ‘Deux Sonates pour le Pianoforte avec un Violon, op. 23’, with a dedication to Count Moritz von Fries, one of the original subscribers to the op. 1 piano trios. When they were first published, however, they appeared with the separate opus numbers which they have today – appropriately so, as they could hardly be more different from each other. The A minor Sonata, in its outer movements at least, is spare textured and impetuous; the Spring Sonata in F major is expansive and lyrical. They were enthusiastically reviewed in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in May 1802, the critic praising ‘their strict order, clarity and craftsmanship’, a pleasant change for Beethoven after the hostile review his three op. 12 violin sonatas had received three years earlier in the same journal.

Count Moritz von Fries A generous patron and a keen amateur musician, Count von Fries (1777– 1826) had studied the violin with Giacomo Conti, leader of the orchestra at the Italian opera in Vienna.