A few days after the concert mentioned in the last chapter, Beethoven again became seriously ill. Dr Anton Braunhofer, one of Vienna's leading physicians, did not mince his words: ‘No wine, no coffee, no spices of any kind. I'll arrange matters with the cook’, he wrote in Beethoven's conversation book on 18 April 1825; ‘then I will guarantee you a full recovery, which understandably means a lot to me, as your admirer and friend … You must do some work in the daytime so that you can sleep at night. If you want to get entirely well and live a long time, you must live according to nature.’Beethoven was already sketching the A minor Quartet – early sketches for it had appeared the previous year – but, for three or four anxious and frustrating weeks, he was too ill to do any creative work. By the end of May, however, he was composing again and had decided to replace his original plan for a slow movement with a ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving to God of an Invalid on his Convalescence’, a title he noted in his current sketchbook.

The quartet was finished in July and two private performances took place on 9 and 11 September at the Zum Wilden Mann in Baden. Schuppanzigh had been forgiven for the mixed reception of the premiere of op. 127, described in the previous chapter, and Holz, Weiss and Linke joined him. It can be assumed that there were plenty of rehearsals this time, some attended by Beethoven's closest friends. Among them, for instance, was one of his ‘most discreet and supportive benefactors’, Johann Wolfmayer, the senior partner in a firm of cloth-merchants, who ‘wept like a child’ as he listened to the slow movement.

Sir George Smart

Also present at both of the private performances was the leading English conductor of the time, Sir George Smart (1776–1867), organist at the Chapel Royal, Windsor, and violinist, who promoted Beethoven and his music unstintingly in Britain. As a young man, he had had the (perhaps unique) distinction of being given a timpani lesson by Haydn when the timpanist failed to turn up for a rehearsal; though a member of the violin section, he bravely volunteered to do what he could to help.