It was Beethoven's favourite of the late quartets: he is quoted as remarking to a friend that he would find "a new manner of part-writing and, thank God, less lack of imagination than before".

"[3] This work is dedicated to Baron Joseph von Stutterheim [de] as a gesture of gratitude for taking Beethoven's nephew Karl into the army after a suicide attempt.

[citation needed] While Beethoven composed the quartet in six distinct key areas, the work begins and ends in C♯ minor.

131 is the first Beethoven work in which the quotation is integrated completely into its new context instead of appearing like an explicit quotation, though even this effect had been anticipated the previous year in the young Felix Mendelssohn's Octet, and much earlier in Christian Latrobe's A major Piano Sonata dedicated to Haydn.)

In particular, the "motto" fugue of the leading note rising to the tonic before moving to the minor sixth and then dropping down to the dominant is an important figure these works share.

The topic has been written about extensively since very early after its creation, from Karl Holz, the second violinist of the Schuppanzigh Quartet, to Richard Wagner, to contemporary musicologists.

In addition, purposely or not, Beethoven quotes a motivic figure from Missa Solemnis in the quartet's second movement.

A fugue based on the following subject, which contains (bars 2–3) the second tetrachord of the harmonic minor scale, the unifying motif of Beethoven's last string quartets: Richard Wagner said this movement "reveals the most melancholy sentiment expressed in music".

"[8] Philip Radcliffe says "[a] bare description of its formal outline can give but little idea of the extraordinary profundity of this fugue.

"[9] A delicate dance in compound duple meter in the key of D major, in compact sonata form based on the following folk-like theme: In the spirit of recitativo obbligato following the key of B minor; the modulation from B minor to E major functions as a short introduction to the next movement.