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The Variations of Johannes Brahms.

Article Excerpt
The Variations of Johannes Brahms. By Julian Littlewood. (Poetics of Music.) London: Plumbago Books, 2004. [xiii, 369 p. ISBN 0-9540123-4-8. $39.95.] Music examples, bibliography, indexes.

Julian Littlewood's The Variations of Johannes Brahms is the first published monograph devoted entirely to Brahms's variations. Seeing variation form as an ideal arena to explore "the stylistic and generic interplay that lay at the heart of Brahms's style" (p. 71), the author traces an array of concerns by placing the variations "in the broader contexts of affect, kinetic control, stylistic reference and intermingling, voice-leading, instrumental writing, narrative drama, rhetoric, external reference and closing strategies" (p. 1). Casting a wide net, the author hopes to avoid what he sees as the pitfalls of formalist accounts, including, to be fair, the present reviewer's dissertation.

The book is in three main sections. Part 1 develops a new typology of variation form by attending to theme "context" (p. 10), which is seen to supercede the more standard dialectic between constant and changing elements. Beginning with "chosen" and "invented" themes and building upon the idea that "to borrow another's music ... is to express an agendum" (p. 9), chapter 1 divides the corpus of variations on chosen themes according to several main contexts, including chorale, national, secular, historical, recycled (i.e. Schubert's variations built upon his own Lied), modeled, and adapted. Chapter 2 unfolds a similar course for invented themes, although context here raises complex issues. Invented themes built from...

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