In character and key, as well as in the presence of a final frenetic section in the parallel major, it is related to another composition of Beethoven's middle period — the overture to his incidental music for Goethe's drama Egmont, which he was composing in the same year he was working on this quartet.

The autograph manuscript for this quartet is inscribed "October 1810", but the paper on which it appears does not match the variety Beethoven is known to have used at that time.

This piece would have been quite out of character in 1810: it is an experiment on compositional techniques the composer would draw on later in his life.

(Techniques such as shorter developments, interesting use of silences, metric ambiguity, seemingly unrelated outbursts and more freedom with tonality in his sonata form.)

Napoleon had invaded Vienna in May 1809 (see Battle of Wagram) for the second time in four years,[2] and this upset Beethoven greatly.

All of his aristocratic friends had fled Vienna, but Beethoven stayed and dramatically complained about the loud bombings.

A modified counterstatement of this entire gesture occurs, landing us on an even more explicit use of the Neapolitan, again enharmonically respelled as D♮, in bars 49–50.

Closing (bars 58–59): There is no repeat of this already very short exposition, which adds to the startling nature of this piece as a whole.

As Arnold Schoenberg notes in an essay reprinted in the collection Style and Idea, most of the themes and events of this movement – and the main theme of the second movement – contain some form of the motive D♭–C–D–E found in the second bar, even if transposed and changed in some way.

Although because of the very odd tempo marking Maynard Solomon warns against calling it a scherzo, preferring the phrase "march-trio".