Dedicated to the pianist Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, née Graumen, it is considered the first of the composer's late piano sonatas.

This sonata marks the beginning of what is generally regarded as Beethoven's final period, where the forms are more complex, ideas more wide-ranging, textures more polyphonic, and the treatment of the themes and motifs even more sophisticated than before.

It shows the first movement already well developed and notated as an extended draft in score, and there are also a few preliminary ideas for the final Allegro.

[1] Beethoven himself described this sonata, composed in the town of Baden, just south of Vienna, during the summer of 1816, as "a series of impressions and reveries."

The more intimate nature of the late sonatas probably has some connection with his deafness, which by this stage was almost total, isolating him from society so completely that his only means of communicating with friends and visitors was via notebooks.

In this period he had achieved a complete mastery of form, texture and tonality and was subverting the very conventions he had mastered to create works of remarkable profundity and beauty.

[citation needed] It is also characteristic of these late works to incorporate contrapuntal techniques (e.g. canon and fugue) into the sonata form.

The tempo marking for the opening movement, Etwas Lebhaft und mit der innigsten Empfindung, is roughly translated as "somewhat lively and with the warmest feeling."