‘Here, my dear friend, is my last quartet’, Beethoven told the Paris publisher Moritz Schlesinger in a letter written in October 1826, during his twomonth visit to his brother Johann in Gneixendorf.

As it happens, op. 135 would not be Beethoven's last contribution to string quartet literature; that honour belongs to the beautiful new finale for op. 130 – the so-called ‘little finale’, discussed in Chapter 27 – which Beethoven completed a month later as an alternative to the Grosse Fuge. Ideas for several orchestral projects had appeared in Beethoven's sketchbooks during the previous two or three years, suggesting that he wanted to return to large-scale compositions as soon as possible. But after completing op. 135 and the ‘little finale’, his attention was further diverted to include an entirely new project, a String Quintet in C major, WoO 62, commissioned by Anton Diabelli. Before much progress could be made with the quintet, however, Beethoven became seriously ill again and, after undergoing a number of painful operations, died on 26 March 1827.

‘A year of awful happenings and most grievous blows’

In spite of the help and support of his friends, particularly Karl Holz and the von Breuning family, 1826 was, in Alexander Thayer's moving words, ‘a year of awful happenings’ and ‘most grievous blows’, countered in the last two quartets and in the ‘little finale’, ‘by a display of creative energy which was amazing not only in its puissance but also in its exposition of transfigured emotion and imagination’.