It has often been asserted that works like the late string quartets were nearly incomprehensible to Beethoven's contemporaries, who judged them defective due to the composer's deafness and other physical infirmities. It is the much later writings of Wagner, Adorno, and others that have often been treated as the starting point for our modern understanding of these works. K. M. Knittel, for example, quotes Sir George Grove as saying that Beethoven's “late works, especially the quartets—had been ‘misunderstood and naturally unappreciated’ at the time of their composition.” “Without exception,” Knittel writes, “all [early] critics posited a connection between the musical characteristics of the third period and Beethoven's deafness and failing health, although the exact nature of the relationship depended on the writer.” She cites Wagner, who, writing under the influence of Schopenhauer, first suggested that Beethoven's deafness gave him an advantage: “the more he ‘lost touch with the outer world,’ as a result of these ‘natural’ endowments [his unusually thick skull and the protection it provided], ‘the clearer-sighted did he turn his gaze upon the world within.’ In Wagner's view, deafness itself provided Beethoven protection.” By further cutting him off from the external world, it allowed his inner imagination to flourish.

According to Adorno, meanwhile, “Beethoven's music came into its fullest realization only in the works from the final decade of the composer's life”— those that exhibit the Spätstil, or late style, in which “the composition no longer obeys the basic law of compositional unity. Instead, its “‘fissures and rifts’ … are the only remaining evidence of a creative subject who can no longer unify and claim mastery of his material.” Adorno's view of Beethoven's late style is reflected in much recent musicological writing, and has even been given a religious twist by Daniel Chua. Of the section of the Cavatina movement of opus 130 that Beethoven marked “beklemmt,” or “oppressed,” Chua writes that Beethoven offers a view of the face of an Other: “Adorno's ‘imponderably delicate aura of the other’ turns out to be the indelible law of the transient particular: the ‘formal law of freedom’ is undone by the absolute command of an ephemeral glance … Could this, then, be the face of God in Christ, reflected in the countenance of the Other?”