Discussions of the heroic style are a fixture of Beethoven studies and Romantic music scholarship more broadly, especially regarding topic theory. Despite this prevalence, concrete signifiers of this topic remain elusive. Unlike many topics, the origin of the heroic topic is clear: the symphonic works of Beethoven’s middle period, especially the Third and Fifth symphonies. As Burnham (1995) and Broyles (1987) have detailed, Beethoven’s heroic style is not reducible to discrete musical parameters. Instead, it results from a monumentalization of formal process, a monolithic treatment of harmony, intense thematic development, and an overall teleological drive. The combination of these elements produces an agential protagonist that listeners can readily identify with. How, then, does such a massive process manifest as a musical topic that may only occupy a fragment of a work’s discourse?

Through a cross examination of studies on the heroic style by Dickensheets (2012), Lim (2022), Anson-Cartwright (2016), and Pethö-Vernet (2022), with repertoires ranging from Chopin’s polonaises to Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, I identify the signifiers of the heroic style as march rhythms, triadic melodies, simpler harmonic progressions, large registral expanses, thick chord voicing, and a sense of performative effort. In effect, this is a smaller-scale distillation of the monumental characteristics of Beethoven’s heroic music. Through this lens, I chart a course from the heroic style’s initial birth as a genre rather than topic in Beethoven’s music and its relatively quick transformation into a musical topic that can be momentarily invoked without denoting an entirely heroic work. To underscore the utility of this framework, I present two case studies from a composer not often associated with the heroic style, Brahms, showing how his engagement with the heroic style as topic rather than genre allows him to craft subversive narratives. Through my analyses of Brahms’s Rhapsody in B Minor and Intermezzo in E-Flat Minor, I demonstrate how he manipulates this topic.

By recognizing the topical signifiers of the heroic style, as well as its origins, we can better contextualize how a late nineteenth-century composer may reflect on the early nineteenth century, leading to more nuanced readings of Romantic compositions.

American composer Amy Beach’s (1867–1944) use of the lullaby topic (see Bourne, 2025; Leccia 2023; Panos 2014) spans her career and across genres. Case studies examine two mature works–the piano solo Cradle Song of the Lonely Mother, Op. 108 (1924) and the duet “Ah, love is a jasmine vine” from the opera Cabildo (1932)–and demonstrate how the lullaby topic serves as order-imposing and transgressive, corresponding to ironic (order defeated) and romantic (order victorious) narrative archetypes respectively (Almén 2004). The resultant narrative archetypes are reinforced through intertextuality and referentiality, as each work involves self-borrowing from an early period art song.

Lullaby is normative and order-imposing in Cradle Song, and the disintegration of topical characteristics across its ternary form produces an ironic, grief-centered narrative. This process of decay–and perpetual submergence of borrowed material from Sleep, Little Darling (1895)–reinforces the thematic focus on death. The intertextual nexus sparked through recontextualization of Sleep, Little Darling– associated synesthetically with Beach's other “pink key” lullabies, and motivically connected to Berceuse for violin and piano, Op. 40, No. 2 (1898)–amplifies symbolic and narrative defeat.

In “Ah, love is a jasmine vine,” Beach modifies the art song When Soul is Joined to Soul, Op. 62 (1905), recasting it in triple meter. Transgressive and tonally distanced, lullaby signifies the dreamspace of the protagonist Mary, and her latent desire. The topic is especially notable in the refrain “My dearest one,” reminiscent of Sleep, Little Darling’s refrain in its tender simplicity. While the modified art song serves as a structural frame and teleological “track” for the duet, these boundaries are repeatedly tested by passionate swells that recede through deferred musical climaxes. The transgressive lullaby topic must be overcome for the fulfillment of both the operatic climax (Agawu, 2009, 1984; Lee, 2020, 2018) and the romance narrative archetype. This occurs in the third strophe when stile appassionato finally displaces lullaby amidst structural and topical dissolution.

These case studies offer insight into the relationship of the lullaby topic and musical narrative in Beach’s works, demonstrating that the topic’s persistence across her oeuvre warrants closer investigation.

Between the middle of the Second World War and the composer’s death, Richard Strauss entered a final period of composition, nicknamed his “Indian summer.” The music from this late period contrasts with the instrumental music of Strauss’ earlier career in that it employs paired down textures and chamber-music-like timbres much more suggestive of a neoclassical style than Strauss’ previous work. In these years, several purely instrumental works were written, each featuring a movement in sonata form. Despite being highly atypical thematically and melodically, these late sonatas are recognizable as such due to timbral, harmonic, and textural signifiers which recall the sonata movements of the classical period. Specifically considering the Horn Concerto No. 2 TrV. 283 (1943) and Oboe Concerto TrV. 292 (1945), the presence of a sonata form only becomes apparent due to the use of such signifiers. In these works a constant motivic development goes on independently of the form-functional boundaries of a sonata form, requiring the use of timbral markers and strict textural divisions between sections of music to communicate the sonata form. With this in mind I propose that in using the timbral components of a sonata to articulate the form, Strauss relies on an idea of the sonata or concerto-sonata as a topic which he references. The consistent reference to classical form and sound suggests a conscious attempt by Strauss to write retrospectives on the “Germanic-symphonic” tradition which was coming to a cataclysmic end during these years. In addition, I propose that the use of these timbral markers allow a classical formal structure to coexist with the motivic-melodic style Strauss had developed during his career as an opera composer.