tes and calls on me to complete before I depart
hence for the Elysian Fields; I feel as if I had written scarcely more
than a few notes."

The initial performance of the first of the Galitzin Quartets took place
in the spring of 1825. Beethoven regarded the event as a momentous
occurrence and required the four performers, Schuppanzich, Weiss, Linke
and Holz, to sign a compact, each to "pledge his honor to do his best
to distinguish himself and vie with the other in zeal."

The quartets once begun were carried on with ardor in the midst of most
distressing occurrences, chief of which were ill health and its twin
demon, poverty, as well as the waywardness of his nephew, all of which
tended to draw him to the spiritual life. The character of Beethoven's
work changed from the period of the Mass in D. An altered condition, an
altogether new, different strain is apparent thenceforth. The deeply
religious, mystical character of the first movement of the Ninth
Symphony can be attributed to his previous absorption on the Mass. He
worked out of this vein somewhat in the other movements as not being
adapted to the uses for which the symphony is designed, but it reappears
again in the quartets to the extent of dominating them.

The one in B Flat, opus 130, completes the three for Prince Galitzin. Of
the Cavatina of this quartet, Holz is authority for saying that
Beethoven composed it with tears, and confessed that never before had
his own music made such an impression on him; that even the repetition
of it always cost him tears. In this movement Beethoven used the word
_Beklemmt_ (_Beklommen_) (oppressed, anxious) at a point where it
modulates into another key. His loneliness, superinduced by his life of
celibacy, by his deafness, his disappointment in his nephew, all had the
effect of separating him from the world. The spiritual side of his
nature, always active, had been brought into new life during his work on
the Mass, as we have seen. It was never thenceforth allowed to fall into
abeyance, but was developed in direct ratio with his withdrawal from
the world. An atavism from some remote Aryan ancestry inclined him, as
in the case of so many Germans, to mysticism and the occult. It was a
condition which had its compensations. That there were periods when he
saw visions may be conjectured by the character of the last quartets.
When they were written, Beethoven was in the shadow of death, on the
border-land of the other world, a