Similarly, processes of variation are conspicuous throughout Mahler’s idiom. So much so that a recent San Francisco Symphony program purposefully juxtaposed Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony (D. 759) with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde to highlight similarities in the treatment of repetition between the two: hearing Mahler through the lens of Schubert foregrounds the use of “variant techniques” in the songs and symphonies of the former. Elements of variation permeate sonata forms throughout the nineteenth century; however, the presence of variation (processes, techniques, and form) in and its subsequent impact on these works remains understudied.
Viewing cyclical procedures through the lens of variation reveals further connections between Schubert and the formal procedures of later nineteenth-century composers. Sonata forms built around these procedures in the mid- to late-nineteenth century find commonalities with the varied returns of thematic material in Schubert’s idiom that integrate thematic and motivic material throughout. This is not to say that Schubert’s sonata forms were the catalysts of cyclic form. Rather, through the analytical framework developed in this dissertation we can better situate Schubert’s contributions to sonata form within the history of the genre as it evolved through the nineteenth century.
[…] The lens of variation helps us to privilege these subtleties—to appreciate that a repetition is never “just” a repetition—and to shed some of the baggage otherwise associated with sonata form in order to appreciate the uniquely Schubertian elements of his contributions the formal genre. As such, we can regain a more flexible conception sonata form, which in turn relaxes our current system of value judgments, and enables analysts to better understand the function of musical form (as a compositional heuristic) in the nineteenth century.
