Beethoven planned the original finale for the last of his Golitsïn quartets on the grandest scale imaginable. It is a work in which emotional and musical extremes are explored to the limit – and then beyond. Like the ‘little finale’ which replaced it, the Grosse Fuge followed the Cavatina without a break, so it too can only be fully appreciated in the context of fear and sorrow, but also consolation, so hauntingly expressed in the Cavatina and its recitative. Beethoven's rare, almost unprecedented, use of block dynamics in the Grosse Fuge provides the clearest explanation of the powerful impact at which he was aiming. Although nuanced dynamics appear occasionally, this sequence of fugal studies is marked either by an unvarying forte/fortissimo or piano/pianissimo, so the picture which emerges is of an uncompromising and complex mental landscape, which can only be explored successfully with patience and fortitude.

While drawing technical inspiration from the past, especially the music of Bach and Handel, the Grosse Fuge is also a vision of the future in which fugue, canon and other contrapuntal devices – ‘tantôt libre, tantôt recherché’ as Beethoven put it – together with variation and ‘fantasy’, are combined in one of the strangest, most original compositions ever written. The Gloria and Credo in the Missa Solemnis, completed in 1823, suggest precedents of a kind. Both are similar in length to the Grosse Fuge, both include alternating fugal and lyrical sections performed without any significant breaks, and all three reflect Beethoven's determination, explained in an earlier conversation with Karl Holz, to create ‘a new and really poetic element’ in the ‘old traditional forms’ in which the imagination can truly ‘assert its privileges.’ In chamber music, however, the only precedent comparable in scale to the Grosse Fuge is Bach's unfinished masterpiece The Art of Fugue.

The fact that Beethoven used the French spelling, Ouverture, in his original manuscript (it appeared in Italian when the Grosse Fuge was published posthumously in May 1827) suggests that, in addition to creating new fugal forms for his time, he may also have wanted to recreate the spirit of a Baroque French overture.