Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Spring 1996 Vol. 17 No. 2

Cataloguing Mozart

Neal Zaslaw

In the decades following Mozart's death in 1791 there were several attempts to inventory his compositions, but it was only in 1862 that Ludwig von Köchel, a Viennese botanist, mineralogist, educator, and the source of the ubiquitous "K," succeeded in this enterprise. Köchel's stout book of 551 pages was entitled (in German) "Chronological-Thematic Catalogue of the Complete Musical Works of WOLFGANG AMADE MOZART. With an Accounting of His Lost, Incomplete, Arranged, Doubtful, and Spurious Compositions." This, the first rigorously scholarly thematic catalogue ever, has served as a model for cataloguing the works of many Western composers.

Mozart cataloguer Ludwig von Köchel

Click on picture for full image.

As his title suggests, Köchel took those works attributed to Mozart that he understood to be neither incomplete, arranged, doubtful nor spurious, and placed them in what he construed as their chronological order, from number 1, a tiny harpsichord piece that Mozart played to his father, who wrote it down, to 626, the Requiem on which he was working when he died. The advantages of chronology for biography are clear: a biographer must know not only what Mozart did but when and where he did it. And a chronological arrangement buttresses the prevailing narrative of Mozart's life, which stresses his precocity and early death. We want to be reminded that he was five when he conceived his first harpsichord piece, nine when he wrote his first symphony, twelve when he composed his first opera and first Mass, and thirty-five when he died in the harness.

The disadvantages of the chronological arrangement are considerable, however, starting with the fact that a work cannot be entered into the Catalogue unless it has been dated, for every Köchel number implies a date. Works therefore must be dated, even in cases where a sound basis for dating is lacking. This has led to outrageous guesswork on the part of usually sober scholars.

A second disadvantage is that, when research redates works, they must be given new numbers, but as the old numbers have permanent status as identifiers, they can never be abandoned. There were revised editions of Köchel in 1905, 1937, and 1964, resulting in many works' having two or three numbers, for instance, the Symphony in B flat major, K. 182 = 166c = 173dA.

Possibly the most striking disadvantage, however, is the way in which a chronological arrangement tacitly supports the persistent myth of how Mozart went about his work. This myth, which pervades not only musical literature but also writings about the creative process in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology, originated in a notorious forgery of 1815-a spurious letter in which "Mozart" is made to assert that he composed in a dreamy state in which -the whole [composition], though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance.' Goethe and Heidegger are only the best-known in the long list of writers taken in by the forgery. Recall the scene in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus in which the dying Mozart is struggling to complete the Requiem in the (improbable) presence of Salieri, who concludes that Mozart is an idiot savante dictated to by God. This scene is based (at second hand) on that forgery. One need only read the genuine letters of Mozart to his father while composing Idomeneo in 1780 or The Abduction from the Harem in 1782 to see how far off the mark the forger was.

But what has all this to do with Herr von Köchel? He knew that the letter was a forgery, since it had been debunked in the monumental biography of Mozart (1858) by his friend, Otto Jahn, to whom he dedicated his Catalogue. Nevertheless, a profoundly Romantic notion about works of art, a notion to which the forged Mozart letter was a parallel manifestation, underlay Köchel's chronology. In starkly simplified form the Romantic idea ran something like this: Mozart was an original genius, geniuses create masterpieces, a masterpiece is perfect, perfection means that a work has unity and that if anything were to be added or taken away, the unity and perfection would be destroyed. Thus the search for the definitive version, or (as the Germans call it) the Urtext.

If the Romantic vision of the genius and his creative output were correct, if Mozart saw the work whole in his imagination and merely had to write it down, if a masterpiece can have only one definitive form and all others are flawed, and if one had adequate documentation for each work, then a Köchel-like chronology could be made to work. Alas for this scenario, none of the preconditions hold. Despite mountains of historical data, we do not have complete, accurate documentation for every work. Further, in recent years painstaking research has revealed that, even though Mozart and his wife destroyed many of them, there remain sketches or drafts for one in ten of his completed works. Then there are sketches or drafts of works never realized, as well as quite a lot of works that had advanced to the fair-copy stage but were abandoned before completion, about one such for each four completed works. In addition, a few completed works prove to have been begun, set aside, and then returned to months or years later. And many completed works have now been shown to exist in two, and sometimes three or more, authentic versions that Mozart himself made for one purpose or another. Taken together, all of these sketches, drafts, abandoned fair copies and alternate versions suggest a state of affairs in striking contrast to the dreamy activities of the forged letter.

Because in the Romantic interpretation only one version could be definitive, all those leading up to it must be preliminary in some way, and all those coming after it potboilers, which Mozart must have been forced to create under pressures from patrons, publishers, or performers. Of course, a less idealized view might suggest that each version is viable and authentic, and that we will never know if Mozart favored one over another. Since (as we now do know) Mozart worked on some compositions over a period of days, weeks, months, or occasionally years, and since when reusing a work he would sometimes alter it, the period in which a work was conceived, completed, and altered often overlapped with the periods in which other pieces were being conceived, completed and altered, making a linear chronology difficult to construct and misleading no matter how carefully handled.

Having to make a new version of Köchel's Catalogue and faced with these difficulties, I considered several other ways of organizing it. Perhaps predictably, however, other systems proved to solve some of Köchel's problems while creating new problems of their own, and the price of forcing everyone to implement a new system of numbering seemed too high. What to do?

I have discovered that if I return to Köchel's original system of numbering and apply it in the most austere manner possible-by omitting the sixty-odd works that aren't really by Mozart, by removing to an appendix the dozen or so additional works that are of questionable authenticity, by returning to an appendix the fragments and arrangements that editions of the Catalogue since 1937 have shoehorned into the chronology of completed works, by prefixing an asterisk to any number that no longer bears chronological significance (for instance, the Flute Quartet in A major, K. *298, composed not in 1777-78 but in 1786-87)-then a workable compromise emerges. Readers of The New Köchel will, I hope, be obliged to face squarely the limits of chronology while at the same time, with spurious and questionable works pruned away, they may glimpse a truer image of Mozart's accomplishments, which, rid of the excesses of Romantic imagination, require no apologies.