In forging a new link between contemporary Formenlehre and a composer’s practice, the analytical framework employed throughout this dissertation provides a model for the theorization of style and its application in analyzing musical form. Moving forward, in adopting a similar mode of contextualizing analysis—identifying inter-generic trends in a composer’s oeuvre reflective of their holistic musical lives—scholars of nineteenth-century music, and musical form, can delve deeper into the idiosyncrasies of any composer.
[…] Schubert’s reputation suffered from constant comparisons with Beethoven because of their historical and geographical proximity. Scholars today still perceive the need to consider the composer on his own terms in order to redress the marginalization of Schubert. […] Indeed, as Jeffrey Perry notes, “one might even ask whether Schubert’s sonata/variation hybridizations were not of greater relevance as concrete models to Brahms, Mahler, and others than were Beethoven’s essays in such hybridization.” In this regard, further elucidation on the presence of variation in nineteenth-century sonata forms is an immensely promising avenue for future research.
It is instructive, for instance, to consider in brief the similarities between Schubert’s sonata forms and those of Johannes Brahms, whose thematic transformations have often been analyzed in language that recalls variation procedures. Walter Frisch’s description of the treatment of thematic material in Brahms’s sonata forms is exemplary in this regard: “the higher-level reinterpretation of a theme at each of its appearances in the sonata form is indeed one of Brahms’s most characteristic and powerful techniques.” The same could be said of distributed variations in Schubert’s idiom. Or, consider processes of loose variation that blur the boundaries between thematic variation and development; in Brahms’s oeuvre this compositional strategy manifests, albeit to greater extremes, in the form of developing variations.
