The resurgence in ‘Formenlehre’ over the past 15 years has tended towards an engagement with sonata form, the concerto, and, to a lesser degree, rondo form. In contrast, there has not been a comprehensive study of variation form since Elaine Sisman’s work on Haydn (1993) that attempts to address the analytical and theoretical lacunae which have historically surrounded the form. In particular, the central methodological issue that confronts the analyst of independent variation sets remains foremost: how can one honour the inherent parataxis of a variation movement’s ‘outer form’ or design (‘Form’), while simultaneously accounting for it as a complete entity by revealing a hypotactic scaffold or ‘inner form’ (‘Formung’) which supports it?