The Catalogues of Beethoven compositions are all of the different ways in which the musical compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven have been organized by researchers into his music.
The Catalogues of Beethoven compositions are all of the different ways in which the musical compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven have been organized by researchers into his music.
Most of Beethoven's best known works were published with opus numbers, with which they may be reliably identified. Another 228 works are designated WoO (Werke ohne Opuszahl – literally, "works without opus number"), among them unpublished early and occasional works (Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II, WoO 87), published variations and folksong arrangements (25 Irish Songs, WoO 152), posthumous publications ( "Für Elise" WoO 59), and a number of unfinished works. The WoO list was extended but still left unaccounted for many fragments and sketches as well as numerous cases of uncertain attribution.
The catalogues described here are attempts to organize and identify with precision all of these works in ways that are useful to musicologists, musicians, and the listening public.
The traditional 19th-century method of identifying a composer's works was for publishers to assign some sort of consecutive opus number to the works as they were published. This method is not entirely satisfactory to anyone. Musicians and the listening public have no reliable way to distinguish different works with similar characteristics. Musicologists cannot reliably identify unpublished works, nor do they have a reliable indication from the opus number of the actual composition date(s). For example, the Octet, written from 1792 to 1793 is Opus 103, while Opus 102 and Opus 104 were written in 1815 and 1817 respectively. Some opus numbers comprise multiple pieces; 172 works are divided among 138 opus numbers.
All of Beethoven's compositions up to and including Opus 135 were published in Beethoven's lifetime; later numbers were published posthumously, and are generally denoted by "Op. posth."
In 1955, Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm published a catalogue of Beethoven's works, in which they assigned numbers to 205 "Werke ohne Opuszahl" (meaning "works without opus number" in German) to some of Beethoven's unpublished works. These numbers given these works are generally preceded by "WoO".
The Kinsky–Halm catalogue also lists 18 works in an appendix as being either doubtfully attributed, or simply spurious. These numbers are generally preceded by "Anh.", short for German Anhang, meaning appendix.
The Swiss composer and musicologist Willy Hess also researched and published a catalogue in the 1950s, in which he included pieces not included in the 19th century complete edition published by Breitkopf and Härtel. Hess included many more fragmentary works than did Kinsky, and his catalog runs to 335 entries in the "Hauptkatalog" (main catalogue), and 66 "doubtful and falsely-attributed" works in an appendix. Many pieces have both WoO and H numbers. A good example would be the Twelve Dances for Orchestra (AKA German Dances) of 1792–1797, which are WoO 13 in the Kinsky catalogue, and H 5 in the Hess catalogue.
Beethoven's compositions are also organized through the Biamonti Catalogue, compiled by Giovanni Biamonti and published in 1968. This work is an attempt to chronologically order all of Beethoven's creative output, in a manner similar to the catalogues of Franz Schubert's works by Otto Erich Deutsch and of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's works by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel. It combines the pieces with opus numbers, all of the works from the Kinsky and Hess catalogues, and previously uncatalogued fragments, into a single list comprising 849 entries.
The following references identify the major catalogues of Beethoven's works.
| Life |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Music | ||
| Memorials | ||
| Depictions |
| |
| Family | ||
| Related | ||
Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter von Köchel was an Austrian musicologist, writer, composer, botanist, and publisher. He is best known for cataloguing the works of Mozart and originating the 'KV-numbers' by which they are known.
In music, the opus number is the "work number" that is assigned to a musical composition, or to a set of compositions, to indicate the chronological order of the composer's publication of that work. Opus numbers are used to distinguish among compositions with similar titles; the word is abbreviated as "Op." for a single work, or "Opp." when referring to more than one work. Opus numbers do not necessarily indicate chronological order of composition. For example, posthumous publications of a composer's juvenilia are often numbered after other works, even though they may be some of the composer's first completed works.
Werke ohne Opuszahl (WoO), also Kinsky–Halm Catalogue, is a German musical catalogue prepared in 1955 by Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm, listing all of the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven that were not originally published with an opus number, or survived only as fragments. The work was originally titled in German Das Werk Beethovens: Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner sämtlichen vollendeten Kompositionen.
Schubert: Thematic Catalogue of all his Works in Chronological Order, also known as the Deutsch catalogue, is a numbered list of all compositions by Franz Schubert compiled by Otto Erich Deutsch. Since its first publication in 1951, Deutsch numbers are used for the unique identification of Schubert's compositions.
The Ludwig van Beethovens Werke: vollständige kritisch durchgesehene überall berechtigte Ausgabe, also known as the Beethoven Gesamtausgabe, was the first collected edition of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven published 1862–1865. Its full title means Ludwig van Beethoven's Works: complete, critical, thoroughly revised, authorized edition).
The Biamonti Catalogue is a catalogue of Ludwig van Beethoven's compositions published in 1968 by the Turin-based publisher Industria Libraria Tipografica Editrice. The original name of the work is Catalogo cronologico e tematico di tutte le opere di Beethoven, comprese quelle inedite e gli abbozzi non utilizzati. Giovanni Biamonti tried to combine all pieces of the author, including all works approached in other catalogues, in a single chronological listing. All other catalogues are numbered by date of publishing. The numeration system used is "Bia" plus the number attributed to the piece in the catalogue.
This article gives an overview of various catalogues of classical compositions that have come into general use.
BWV Anh., abbreviation of Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis Anhang, is a list of lost, doubtful, and spurious compositions by, or once attributed to, Johann Sebastian Bach.
The Flute Sonata in B-flat major, Anh. 4 is a composition for flute and keyboard attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven found amongst his papers after his death. It remained unpublished until 1906.
The Kyrie–Gloria Mass for double choir, BWV Anh. 167, is a mass composition in G major by an unknown composer. The work was likely composed in the last quarter of the 17th century. The composition has two sections, a Kyrie and a Gloria, each subdivided in three movements. It has twenty-two parts for performers: twelve parts for singers, and ten for instrumentalists, including strings, wind instruments and organ. Johann Sebastian Bach may have encountered the work around 1710, when he was employed in Weimar. In the 1730s he produced a manuscript copy of the Mass.
In music, a sketch is an informal document prepared by a composer to assist in the process of composition.
Giovanni Biamonti was an Italian musicologist best known for his work on the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Administrative secretary of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia from 1924 to 1963, Biamonti's greatest achievement was his eponymous catalogue of Beethoven's complete works, including many not contained in either the Beethoven Gesamtausgabe, or Kinsky/Halm or Hess catalogues. Arranged chronologically, it contains a total of 849 works, including sketches and fragments stretching from the variations for piano on a march by Ernst Christoph Dressler of 1782 to Beethoven's last bars in 1827.
Georg Ludwig Kinsky was a German musicologist.
