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This kills me. K525 is the most consistent way of referring to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or whatever, but it’s also Serenade 13. That’s three names for any given piece. Also some pieces are just “Piano Concerto in D”. Didn’t some composers write many piano concertos (some of which many of were in D key)? The naming of these musical pieces that are famous and recognizable and well-known to music connoissuers is just abominable! You’d think something with that much reverence would have more consistent naming . I guess that’s why the “K” or “Opus” (like K525, Serenade 13, or Opus 125, Beethoven’s final complete and 9th Symphony), naming developed, but those aren’t used! On concert flyers it always just has the unidentifiable “Serenade Number” or “Violin Concerto”. How does the instrument indicate what composition it is? This has been a massive headache and monumental hindrance to my ongoing project (for over three years) of properly naming and identifying classical music. I’m spot on and quite knowledgeable (good classical music biographical knowledge recording of mine) on biographies of composers and the movements, but a major goal is auditory identification of some of the works! But the inconsistent naming is unquestionably all sixes and sevens!
UPDATE: This magnificent Mozart Project site answers a ton of questions and solidly tabulates standardized naming for a lot of Mozart’s work (possibly all?!) using the Kochel catalog numbers. Good to know epic pieces of sound have a standardized (but highly unused) naming!
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This work by John Thomas Kooz (aka John Kooz aka John K. Thomas) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
