Variation as Thematic Actualisation: the Case of Brahms's Op. 9

Generally speaking, variation sets in the Classical period are characterised primarily by embellishment and change of texture, effected so as to create a multitude of views of the same object. In the Romantic period, on the other hand, the theme is not so much decorated as reinterpreted: its harmonic and melodic constituents are exposed, then reconfigured. The change can be traced back to as early as 1802, the year in which Beethoven wrote his EroicaVariations, Op. 35, describing them to his publishers as having been composed in ‘a truly new manner’. Yet, like many generalisations, this binary opposition distorts reality to a certain extent: not all variations in Classical sets are primarily decorative, and even those that are often employ figuration and texture in subtle, strategic ways so as to foreground, elucidate and alter tonal and motivic elements of the theme. Indeed, decorative and interpretative functions can coexist. Conversely, some variations in Romantic sets are unapologetically decorative: their figuration fails to shed new light on their themes. However, the stylistic dichotomy proposed here does, I believe, reflect a general trend, according to which nineteenth-century variations reimagine their themes more often, and more significantly, than do their eighteenth-century predecessors. This dichotomy may be recast from the standpoint of a theme. The implicit corollary of the belief that Classical variations are essentially decorative is that the theme in a Classical set is an autonomous entity with fixed melodic and harmonic components, susceptible to embellishment but not reinterpretation. In other words, anyone who presupposed a set of variations to be primarily ornamental would probably also regard the theme as self-contained, self-defined and directly given – an entity whose underlying structural properties are neither laid bare nor fundamentally altered in the course of the variations. By contrast, anyone who granted variations greater interpretative potency would probably regard the theme not as an a priori entity but as something whose identity is contingent upon the processes to which it is subjected. Again, although we can not neatly align the former conception with the pre-Eroica sets and the latter one with those of Beethoven’s middle period and beyond, I contend that the themes DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2012.00341.x