Rasoumowsky lived in his new palace on the Donau Canal, into which he had very recently removed from the Wallzeil and in which he had put his domestic establishment on a footing of great splendor. It suited his taste to have the first string quartet of Europe in his service. His own skill rendered him amply competent to play the second violin, which he usually did; but the young Mayseder, or some other of the first violinists of the city, was ever ready to take his part when required. Three permanent engagements only were, therefore, necessary, and these now, in late summer or early autumn, 1808, were made. To Schuppanzigh--then the first of quartet players, but still without any permanent engagement--was given the appointment for life of ~violino primo~, and to him was entrusted the selection of the others. He recommended Weiss for the viola, whom Rasoumowsky accepted and to whom, for himself and family, he granted a suitable lodging in one of the houses connected with the palace.
Schuppanzigh had been so favorably impressed with the talents and skill of Linke as to secure him the place of violoncellist. He was a young man of 25 years--slightly deformed in person--an orphan from his childhood.
As before stated, Förster was the Count's instructor in musical theory, the accomplished Bigot was librarian and his talented wife pianist. These were the years (1808-1815) when, says Seyfried, "as is known Beethoven was, as it were, cock of the walk in the princely establishment; everything that he composed was rehearsed hot from the griddle and performed to the nicety of a hair, according to his ideas, just as he wanted it and not otherwise, with affectionate interest, obedience and devotion such as could spring only from such ardent admirers of his lofty genius, and with a penetration into the most secret intentions of the composer and the most perfect comprehension of his intellectual tendencies; so that these quartet players achieved that universal celebrity concerning which there was but one voice in the art-world."
The date of Dragonetti's arrival in Vienna, on this, his second visit, disposes of an English tradition, that Beethoven wrote the famous contrabass passage in the Scherzo of the C minor Symphony expressly for him. The story contains doubtless so much of truth as this: that it was the display of the possibilities of that instrument, made by its greatest master, which induced Beethoven to venture the introduction into that symphony of what has so often proved a stumbling-block and rock of offence to contrabassists of no common and ordinary skill.