They were composed between 1798 and 1800 to fulfill a commission for Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowitz, who was the employer of Beethoven's friend, the violinist Karl Amenda.
They are thought to demonstrate his total mastery of the classical string quartet as developed by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
See: In an April 1802 letter to Hofmeister in Leipzig, Beethoven says the Mollo edition of nos.
4-6 is error-ridden ("has again, let us say, filled with faults and errata, great and small"),[3] and Kerman[1] makes a similar comment, leaving one to conclude that the poor Mollo edition of nos.
4-6, which incited private protests from the composer, may also be the best existing primary source for those three works, unless manuscripts or sketches for them have been discovered.