The New Köchel Catalog

Thursday, September 19, 2024

This morning the long-awaited new edition of the Köchel Catalog was presented to the public in the Great Hall of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg. The new edition was compiled by Neal Zaslaw, Professor at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), and meticulously prepared for printing by the research team of the International Mozarteum Foundation headed by Dr. Ulrich Leisinger.

In 1862, Ludwig Ritter von Köchel published the first chronological list of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s works – ranging from K. 1, the first minuet penned by Mozart himself, to K. 626, the Requiem, which the composer could not complete due to his untimely death. In order to reflect the rapidly growing knowledge of diverse aspects of Mozart’s oeuvre, several new editions were subsequently published, based on the conviction that new insights into chronology should also be reflected in a revised numbering of the works themselves. However, the resulting web of numbers with countless cross-references became increasingly complicated and unsurprisingly failed to gain general acceptance among Mozart scholars and performing musicians alike.

The new edition presented today, which appears for the first time under the name “Köchel-Verzeichnis,” returns to the original numbering and no longer insists on a chronological order. At the same time, 95 compositions that had not been granted a separate entry in any of the previous editions of the Köchel catalog have now received numbers of their own, starting with K. 627. Indeed, some of these were discovered (or at least identified as works by Mozart) during the preparations for the new edition, such as his first concerto movement (K. 636), which survived in the so-called Nannerl-Notenbuch (the piano book of the composer’s sister Maria Anna) without an author’s name. In addition to this piece, a previously unknown work, a short serenade in C major for 2 violins and bass (K. 648), which Mozart had probably written for his sister before his 13th birthday, was also performed at today’s book launch in Salzburg.

Thanks to many years of collaboration between Neal Zaslaw and the research team of the International Mozarteum Foundation led by Ulrich Leisinger, the new Köchel Catalog integrates the latest results of international Mozart research. The composer’s arrangements, cadenzas and studies are presented in newly structured appendices, whereby potential misattributions have also been scrupulously clarified. In addition to the thematic overview, the volume also offers numerous indices and an extensive bibliography (and in fact weighs about three kilograms).

To coincide with the launch of the printed volume (which, like Köchel’s first edition, has been published by Breitkopf & Härtel), the International Mozarteum Foundation is presenting the first stage of a new digital offering, Köchel digital. The digital networking of the new Köchel thematic catalog as a comprehensive and reliable knowledge base with an easy-to-use digital information structure is meant to provide all music lovers and Mozart enthusiasts around the world with free access to Mozart’s works accompanied by the most up-to-date background information.

Regular users of the RISM database will no doubt be pleased also to learn that the adjusted numbering of the new Köchel Catalog has already been integrated in the RISM entries for all the Mozart autographs kept in the Bibliotheca Mozartiana in Salzburg (see e.g. RISM Catalog | RISM Online).

Image: The end of the first movement of the Sonata in A major (K. 331) in Mozart’s autograph (discovered in 2014). National Széchényi Library, H-Bn Ms. mus. 15.289 (RISM ID 530011221 - RISM Catalog | RISM Online). Available online.

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Catégorie: Nouveautés

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