I know that I'm not the only one who finds some weird pleasure in organizing records, books and thrifted Adidas sweatshirts. Even if your system all falls apart in a matter of days, organizing is absurdly cathartic — and necessary. Composers, publishers and musicologists know this too well, and that's why those letters are stubbornly affixed to the titles of compositions.
Let's start with "op.," a letter combination you are very likely to encounter at random, and far and away the messiest of the bunch. "Op." is actually an abbreviation of the Latin word "opus," which means "work." It's plural form, "opera," has been found misleading for some strange reason, and in English "opuses" has become an acceptable alternative.
Up until the 1800s, music publishers usually assigned opus numbers to compositions or groups of compositions to indicate the chronological order of a composer’s works. So let's imagine a perfect world, where you stumble upon the oeuvre of Van de Garre.* There's a list of the composer’s works, neatly labeled from op. 1 to op. 100, their final work. It's a perfect record of their developing tastes and maturing styles; one could listen to the evolution of the composer from beginning to end.
But things aren't that simple. See, opus numbers were often assigned by music publishers instead of the composers themselves, and this is where it gets crazy. During the classical era, publishers would often publish a group of compositions together under a single number. For example, Haydn's Op. 1 contains six different string quartets. Also, if a composer handed off a piece of music to two different publishers, there's a chance it may have received two different opus numbers. Things are muddied even further when you keep in mind that vocal music often didn't get an opus number, because a title like "An die Musik" is easier to remember than something like Piano Trio No. 3 in F. And, since opus numbers were largely a fixture of the publishing world, compositions that were written for stage, like operas, also generally lack that numbered badge.
From the time of Beethoven onward, composers started assigning their own opus numbers before sending them to publishers. But that was still far from perfect. How do you account for unpublished items? Scrapped projects? Or works that were written early in a composer’s career, but published decades later — and therefore receive a high number?
You can thank a handful of ultra-dedicated musicologists who created their own catalogues for appropriately organizing some composers sprawling bodies of work. That's why, instead of "op." you might see...
- RV (Vivaldi): Ryom-Verzeichnis, cataloged by Peter Ryom."Verzeichnis" means "directory".
- BWV (J.S. Bach): Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, cataloged by Wolfgang Schmieder
- K (Mozart): Köchel-Verzeichnis
There are many, many more.
Here’s something to keep in mind about these overachieving musicologists: their catalogs aren't always chronological. Some are, like Otto Deutsche's system for Schubert. But others, like the BWV catalogue, are sorted by genre instead of date. This means that all the passions, solo piano works and violin concertos carry marks in a similar range, all the way up to BWV 1128, a chorale fantasia for organ that was added in 2008.
All these intricate catalogue systems aren't particularly useful in this digital day and age, but we keep them around for posterity. That’s why you shouldn’t laugh at someone's meticulously pieced together organizational system. You should marvel at it instead. Now, if you don't mind, there's a pile of throwback New Yorkers that need attending to.
*Not an actual composer, but an actual beer from the Belgian Van Steenberge brewery. Hey, I said, "let's imagine a perfect world."