FEW MUSICIANS - and fewer critics - appear to have confronted the enigmatic final cello sonata in the last decade of Beethoven's life, but within thirty years of his death at least one devotee rose to the challenge. In 1854, Wilhelm von Lenz, a Russian official and author of German descent who wrote in French, released a biography of the composer, Beethoven et ses trois styles, an early attempt to divide his music into three ‘manières’ - the familiar early, middle, and late styles that, despite some challenges, are still widely accepted today. There Lenz assigned Op. 102 No. 2 to Beethoven's ‘third manner’, and readily conceded that it had garnered little sympathy from audiences. ‘Nonetheless’, he continued, ‘the Adagio exhibits a remarkable if somber beauty. Behold, there is the forest of Norma, the Druids’ sacrifice, and the confections [caramelles] of Bellini.’ But then, in an abrupt pivot: ‘The final fugue of the sonata is unplayable - it is a perfect scarecrow. No one has succeeded less in [the art of] fugue than him.’ If we set aside Lenz's purple prose and his unequivocal rejection of the finale, he was still able to grasp Beethoven's intent in Op. 102 to create true ensemble music: ‘No instrumental duet [has] gone so far in transmitting the musical idea in abstraction from the medium. The form is raised above itself.’

Though prescient, Lenz's description was, for most if not all of the remainder of his century, well removed from reality: decades would elapse before Op. 102 secured its rightful place within the slowly developing canon of works for the instrument. If, as Ernest Newman claimed in 1927, Lenz's agendum in writing his biography was ‘to discover the personal secrets of a man's art’, Op. 102 No. 2 left him, like many others at mid-century, nonplussed and unable to come to terms with his hero's liberal vision of the art of counterpoint. Remarkably, such attitudes persisted even well into the twentieth century, as is evident in this assessment by Robert Schauffler, among Beethoven's numerous biographers: ‘Thirty years’ study of this rough-hewn movement, as violoncellist and critic, has never altered the writer's conviction that its brutality, inflexibility and lack of poetic relief make the first fugue of the nine [late fugues] the worst of them.’