The aim of this book is to provide professional and amateur musicians and music lovers generally with an outline of the historical context and character of over fifty chamber works composed by Beethoven during his thirty-five years in Vienna. Articles and books on the subject usually focus on specific genres – string quartets, violin sonatas or, more generally, chamber music for strings and piano or strings and wind – and there is much to be said for such an approach in an age of specialists, where such writing can be matched by appropriate boxed sets of compact discs. But something important may be lost in the process.

Although differing in genre, Beethoven's early chamber works, published in the late 1790s and early 1800s, share the same exhilarating context of innovation, excitement and creative energy which he experienced during his earlier years in Vienna. His later chamber music – the three Razumovsky quartets, for example, or the A major Cello Sonata, op. 69, and the two op.70 piano trios, were no less affected by the more mature and spacious context created by Beethoven in the aftermath of two of his greatest and truly seminal works, the Eroica Symphony and Fidelio. The six transcendent late quartets, composed during the last three years of his life, were similarly empowered by the spirituality of the Missa Solemnis and the majesty of the Ninth Symphony.

Contemporary audiences expected a mixture of genres at public concerts and private soirées, such as one given by Countess Josephine von Deym on 10 December 1800: ‘Beethoven played the sonata with cello. I played the last of the [violin] sonatas, accompanied by Schuppanzigh who, like all the others, played divinely. Then Beethoven, that real angel, let us hear his quartets which have not been engraved yet and are the greatest of their kind. The famous Kraft played the cello, Schuppanzigh first violin. You can imagine what a treat it was for us!’