K Is for Koechel

K IS FOR KOECHEL

SCRIPT as aired 1/27/06 on GPB

[Part 1]

(Music: Magic Flute Overture. Mackerras, Telarc 80345)

(chord) SZ From Georgia Public Broadcasting, . . . (chords) This is K is for Koechel . . . (chords) The story behind those Mozart numbers.

(strings) If you listen to classical radio, sooner or later you’ll hear something like:

FC “Here’s the Overture to The Magic Flute, K. 620.”

SZ Or maybe:

FC “This is the Overture to The Magic Flute, 620 in the Koechel catalog of Mozart’s works.”

SZ What is the Koechel Catalog? Who was this Koechel, and what are his numbers doing in our Mozart?

In a nutshell, Ludwig Koechel was a patriotic Austrian with a passion for Mozart. He set out to make a master list of everything Mozart composed, arranged in order and numbered piece by piece. His Catalog of Mozart’s works came out in 1862.

Koechel got an impressive amount right. But not everything.

(...fugue starts at 1:14) I’m Sarah Zaslaw. This hour join me and my father, Neal Zaslaw, editor of the latest version of the Koechel catalog, as we explore how Ludwig Koechel did what he did.

NZ He came so close; he was really batting in the high 90s. 2

SZ Along the way, we’ll confront issues that go far beyond dusty archive work. What’s our image of genius? How did Mozart really compose? What’s a meaningful way to lay out Mozart’s works? We’ll trace the post-Koechel quest for the perfect Mozart chronology. We’ll learn about modern forensic tricks, from paper dating to handwriting analysis, that can help us pinpoint what Mozart wrote and when. And, of course, we’ll hear the stuff that makes it all matter: Mozart’s music.

(Music continues about a minute, to cadence)

SZ Ludwig Koechel was born in Stein, Austria, in 1800, nine years after Mozart’s death. As a young man Koechel pursued many interests. He earned a law degree at the University of Vienna. He published translations of ancient Greek texts. He made scientific contributions in botany and mineralogy. He also tutored the sons of Austria’s Archduke Karl, who thanked him with money and an honorary knighthood, turning Ludwig Koechel into the independently wealthy Ludwig von Koechel. On top of all that, he was an amateur musician. Koechel would write light music to sing around the piano at soirees with his friends. Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw:

NZ It’s hard to get any idea what kind of a person he was. He never married, he didn’t have children. His pictures make him look fierce, but given that he had this circle of friends and that they got together to sing and play in the evenings, maybe he had another side that I don’t know about.

SZ And, Koechel had a thing for Mozart.

NZ He was a rather conservative type who thought music wasn’t going well in the 19th century and turned back to Mozart as his hero, and really in an almost obsessional way devoted his life to cataloging Mozart’s works. Prior to that time, certain famous pieces were well known but really nobody had any idea what Mozart wrote, and there were a lot of things attributed to him that he didn’t write.

SZ Previous attempts to catalog Mozart’s music had failed. Koechel, who by now had money, set out to do better.

NZ He was certainly very persistent. He did a pretty good job of communicating with all the European libraries and collections and finding out what was there and evaluating them. He traveled around a bit, he saw quite a lot of the manuscripts, many of which were still in private hands. He corresponded with people in distant cities that he didn’t get to (like London).

SZ In the end, Koechel’s persistence paid off.

NZ His catalog, which was the work of more than a decade, was the first complete, accurate catalog of any Western composer. 3

(String Quartet in C, K. 157, 1st mvt, 0-1:32. Amer. Str Quartet, MusicMasters box.) SZ Koechel Fun Fact No. 1. Ker-who? Let’s get a grip on that name. After being awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Leopold, Koechel’s full title was Dr. Ludwig Alois Ferdinand Ritter von Koechel. For short, he’s Ludwig von Koechel or, more informally, Ludwig Koechel. Americans, including me, often pronounce his last name “Kerrrshel,” giving the impression there’s an R in there. There’s really not. A proper German speaker would pronounce it like this:

Susanna (Enco 9360) Köchel. Köchel.

SZ If you have German accent-marks handy, you can spell that K o-umlaut c-h-e-l. Otherwise, K-o- e-c-h-e-l does just fine.

(Music to end of section)

SZ Let’s back up for a moment. If you were Ludwig Koechel sitting down to make a super-duper Mozart master list . . . how would you organize it? . . . Well, one option would be to sort it by type of piece: all the piano sonatas here, operas there, and so on: by genre. . . . Or, you could list Mozart’s pieces in the order they were published, by opus number. Come to think of it, why doesn’t Mozart have opus numbers, like, say, Beethoven?

NZ There are opus numbers for those works of Mozart’s that were published, but the various publishers did not coordinate the opus numbers, so there’re many opus 1s and many opus 2s and many opus 3s, and therefore for identification purposes they’re useless. And then in addition, less than half of Mozart’s music was published during his lifetime, so there’s a huge body of works that had no opus numbers.

SZ Koechel’s big idea was to list the music in the order in which Mozart composed it. That is, chronologically.

(Music: Bassoon concerto. Orpheus, Morelli, DG 423 623. Rondo finale.)

Now think about this. To put he pieces in order, Koechel had to have some idea not only what Mozart wrote but when he wrote it. Luckily, many of Mozart’s manuscripts give dates. Mozart’s father had planned to write a book about his son the prodigy, so he taught young Wolfgang to date the final version of each piece he completed, and in general he did. Mozart also kept a basic index of his own music for the last seven years of his life, and that covers about a third of his output. But what could Koechel do with a piece that simply had no certifiable date of composition, like this bassoon concerto? … No date, no K number. Where Koechel didn’t know, he had to make an educated guess.

NZ You might ask, well, why did he choose chronology? I think that’s part of the Mozart story or myth—namely, how precocious he was, so that by 5 he was already composing, and by 12 he had written an opera and symphonies and so on, and then the fact that he died young. So in order to 4 tell that story you want the chronology, you want to be able to say: “And he was only 18 when he wrote this fantastic piece.”

(Bassoon concerto to end of mvt)

SZ Now, there’s no question Mozart did amazing things at a young age. But the Mozart myth goes beyond that. Two and a half decades after Mozart’s death, a music critic named Friedrich Rochlitz claimed to have discovered an unknown letter by Mozart. In this letter, Mozart purportedly describes how he goes about composing:

(Flute & harp co slow mvt. Hogwood/AAM, L’Ois 417 622.)

TL (Enco 7689) “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind—so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. For this reason the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.”

NZ This forgery — (Concerto fades out abruptly) — because that’s what it was — had a tremendous impact. This seemed to be what people wanted to believe about the nature of genius in the Romantic period. And so you get the Mozart that one sees portrayed in the film Amadeus, where even when he’s dying, God is still dictating the Requiem to him, and Salieri is witnessing this in just incomprehension where these ideas are coming from.

(Req: Amadeus soundtrack: Mozart dictating the Confutatis to Salieri, then we hear the music, w/the chorus/orch/rattling cart and Moz singing weakly.)

So Mozart became the child who never grew up, who didn’t know what he was doing on a conscious level, who was just a mouthpiece for divine inspiration.

(Requiem Confutatis plays, starts fading at Voca me)

SZ Ludwig Koechel knew that famous letter from 1815 was a forgery. But at some level he still bought into its underlying ideal of genius. If he could just pin the right Mozartean moment of inspiration to each perfected work of art, he’d have his chronology.

NZ If we go back to this idea that the piece came to him whole in his imagination, then when you have several versions of a piece, you have to decide which version is the definitive version. And the whole industry of studying Mozart and editing his works and publishing them and performing them has been devoted to figuring out what he wanted at that moment of inspiration, and it turns out that that’s not how he worked. We now know that Mozart wanted to have a piano or harpsichord when he was composing, he didn’t compose just in his head. We now know he sketched certain things. We now know that he abandoned pieces that weren’t going well. So the picture of it coming whole to him no longer works out with the documents that we have. 5

SZ Yes, talented though Mozart was, he actually had to work at his composing. Also, finishing a piece didn’t necessarily mean it was…finished.

NZ Each time he took out a piece to play again, he looked at it, and if he thought he could improve it, or alter it for new circumstances, he did not hesitate to do so. So there are many pieces with several perfectly definitive versions, if you want to use the word definitive. … One can take a very famous work that seems to us to have a very concrete identity. Take Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. …

(Music: Figaro: Fandango, Act III, scene 14. Jacobs Harm Mundi: CD 3, track 9. vocal over music-w/in-music from Gluck, then instrs to foreground)

It’s an all-time hit, delightful music, delightful story, and we think we have it. You can go out and buy a score of it, and singers spend years learning those roles so that they can sing "The Marriage of Figaro.” But it turns out when you look at it, it’s a much more slippery item than we’ve been led to think.

SZ During Mozart’s lifetime there were three different productions of Figaro that he and his librettist were involved in with…

NZ …And it seems that almost every night that it was on the stage, Mozart and da Ponte fiddled with it, they changed things. Part of the changes had to do with the fact that it was too long. Even before the first performance they realized it was too long, so they were trying to trim a few minutes here and there.

SZ Some contemporary performances completely omitted this bit, the Act 3 fandango, the wedding march.

(Music up for a few seconds, then continue under)

NZ Then they were trying to make things work in the theater, so if something didn’t seem to go smoothly or please the audience, they would tinker with that. When the cast changed, Mozart often felt he had to revise the vocal music to suit the voices. And so when you look at the original sources, they are a mess. You can see that it’s changing but it’s very hard to know on what night a given thing was changed, and it never stabilized. So you can almost say that there are potentially 20 or 30 versions of this opera. And this creates problems for cataloging a work, because the work wasn’t finished the night of the premiere. It continued to be finished as long as Mozart had anything to do with it.

(Figaro bit plays to end)

SZ But despite the challenges and pitfalls, Ludwig Koechel did come up with some date for everything he attributed to Mozart. Koechel had hoped to print a complete edition of all of 6

Mozart’s music. He didn’t get around to that. But what he did publish in 1862 is a milestone all by itself: the three-pound tome we know as the first Koechel catalog. It made order out of Mozartean chaos.

NZ The Requiem on which he was working on when he died is number 626, and number 1 is a little harpsichord piece that he improvised for his father and his father wrote it down very proudly, noting the circumstances.

(0:19 harpsichord music, K. 1a) (even though Koechel called K. 1e his no. 1)

So the official number was 626 works.

SZ Six hundred twenty-six. Did Koechel get it right? Stay tuned! But first...

(Harpsichord music, K6 33B, the bouncy blindfold piece from Amadeus, 1:07)

Koechel Fun Fact No. 2. The actual title of Koechel’s catalog. Did he call it “the Koechel Catalog”? No! Its flowery title page read: Chronological and Thematic Catalog of the Complete Works of Wolfgang Amade Mozart, Together with an Accounting of His Lost, Unfinished, Transcribed, Dubious, and Spurious Compositions. You can see why we just call it the Koechel Catalog. The book’s main chronology contained that list from one to six hundred twenty-six. Pieces in those other, less certain categories went into the appendix.

(Harpsichord piece ends)

Coming up: Dating Mozart, good dates and bad. But first, how about some more music. Mozart for piano this time.

(Piano Sonata in C, K. 545, 1st mvt. Barenboim, EMI box 47336. 3:03//6//4)

[Part 2]

SZ This is K is for Koechel, the story of those Mozart numbers. I’m Sarah Zaslaw. We’re spending this hour with my father, Neal Zaslaw, who is the head editor of the nearly finished, very latest version of the Koechel Catalog.

Ludwig Koechel tallied six-hundred and twenty-six complete pieces by Mozart. So, how’d he do? Did he find all of Mozart’s works?

NZ He came so close that I wonder how he did it. He was really batting in the high 90s. This is a matter of not having overlooked any major compositions. There are a certain number of lesser compositions he that overlooked or had put in an appendix ’cause he wasn’t sure that have turned out to be by Mozart, but not a large number. But when it comes to getting the chronology right, it’s much more complicated. … Poor Koechel had to do a certain amount of clever guesswork, some of which turns out to be very clever and correct and other dating turns out to be wrong. 7

(Music: Flute Quartet K. 298 up. DG 341 770, Emerson/Wincenc. Finale, last -0:54.)

SZ This is just one example of a piece whose date Koechel didn’t quite nail: Mozart’s Quartet for Flute and Strings in A major, K. 298. … For various plausible reasons, Koechel thought Mozart wrote this in the year 1778. If only he’d known that Mozart based this section on an opera aria by Paisiello that didn’t yet exist then. Scholars have since confirmed that Mozart actually composed this flute quartet ten years later, by which time Paisiello had written the tune.

(Flute quartet ends)

Some of Koechel’s incorrect datings have to do with Mozart’s own clerical skills. Mozart was not a perfect self-chronicler. In his own musical catalog he started keeping in 1784, he made mistakes, and he left things out.

NZ And it was the things he left out that Koechel was afraid to put into those last years, because they weren’t in the official catalog that Mozart himself kept, and therefore he found excuses to keep moving them before 1784. So in 1783 there’s quite a grab bag of strange pieces.

SZ Koechel Fun Fact No. 3. The secret formula. If you start from the Koechel number of a Mozart piece, you can figure out roughly how old Mozart was when he wrote it. Even when things were going badly in Mozart’s life, as they sometimes did, he kept composing at a remarkably steady and prolific rate. Neal Zaslaw noticed that once Mozart really got up and running as a composer, from about his hundredth piece on, he consistently wrote right around 25 works a year. Got your pencil ready? Here’s the formula. To find Mozart’s age, you divide the K number by 25; and then you add 10, to compensate for Mozart’s less productive preadolescent years, and that’s your answer.

NZ Let’s take the example of the Jupiter Symphony, K. 551. …

(Music: Jupiter double fugue enters)

You want to find out how old Mozart was when he composed it. So you divide 551 by 25 and you get 22; and you add 10, and you find out that he was 32 years old.

SZ And it’s true, he was!

(Jupiter finale plays to end)

SZ Time for some armchair musicology now, as we flesh out the story of the Koechel catalog after Koechel.

Ludwig Koechel’s catalog listed Mozart’s music in the order of composition. But even the clever Koechel didn’t have every single last Mozart factoid at his fingertips. Which raises certain issues of historical housekeeping for his successors. 8

Pretend you’re a scholar who’s just discovered a new Mozart piece, or maybe you’ve redated an old one, and now it needs a new K number. What do you do? Do you tack your Mozart piece on at the end of Koechel’s list, out of order, way up in the 600s? Or do you somehow shoehorn it in at the right spot in the timeline?

Ludwig von Koechel died in 1877. After Koechel’s death, a friend of his, Count von Waldersee, took over the Mozart project. He published a minor revision of Koechel’s catalog in 1905, without really having to grapple with the numbering system.

NZ It’s very funny—in the preface to the second edition he has a list of pieces he’s omitted and pieces he’s added, and he omitted 10 and he added 11, and he brags that he’s increased the number by 1.

SZ A couple of decades later, the publishers commissioned a broader revision of the Koechel Catalog. For this they hired a respected music critic and scholar from Berlin named Alfred Einstein. That’s Alfred Einstein, not to be confused with physicist Albert Einstein, who might have been a distant cousin of his.

(Music: Gran Partita bit starts. Theme & vars, var. 2, 1:21. Orpheus, DG 423 061.)

Alfred Einstein came up with new dates for a lot of Mozart’s works. He now needed to renumber and move these pieces in the list. But how? Koechel hadn’t left expansion slots.

Here’s what Alfred Einstein did: He added lowercase letters to numbers as needed, to create spots. For example, this piece, Mozart’s Gran Partita for winds, was originally K. 361. Einstein wanted it to go after K. 370 now, so he called it K. 370a. In Einstein’s Koechel catalog, K numbers festooned with letters sprouted like mushrooms after a rain.

(Gran Partita bit ends here.)

NZ Now I’m afraid that politics and war enter into the story at this point, because Einstein was Jewish, and by the time he had written the preface he had fled Germany and he was in Florence. During the Second World War a lot of Mozart’s manuscripts were temporarily or permanently lost or displaced. So for instance a large collection of manuscripts in the Berlin library were shipped out of Berlin for safekeeping and disappeared. So this was the state of affairs after World War II, that it was not known where a lot of the source material was. Einstein was meanwhile in the United States, where he had seen various Mozart sources that no European scholar had ever looked at before. And then it was realized that because one of the functions of the catalog was to tell you where the sources were, and so many of them had moved, it was necessary to redo the catalog.

(Music: Sym no. 24 in Bb, start. Amst Bar Orch, Koopman. Erato 2292 45544,)

SZ A team of three German-speaking Mozart scholars went to work. In their research, they undid many of Einstein’s datings and made many new datings of their own. When they needed new slots between K numbers, you know what they did? They added … capital letters! 9

Take this symphony. Ludwig Koechel called it number 182. In Alfred Einstein’s catalog, this was one of several pieces that sidled in after K. 166, where it became 166c. Then the later editors tweaked its position in the timeline again, wedging it in between the pieces Einstein had dubbed K. 173d and K. 173e, and the symphony now became—get this—K. 173...lowercase- d...uppercase-A.

(Symphony bit ends)

Unwieldy, to say the least. …These postwar Mozart scholars had to work under very difficult circumstances, and the Koechel catalog they published in 1964 shows it. Neal Zaslaw:

NZ The Cold War was on, so they couldn’t look at anything much in Eastern Europe; the whole idea of international cooperation was not fully formed the way it is now; they didn’t have instant scans and photocopies and so on. And they brought together the latest information that they could, but it’s a very unsatisfactory edition, and that’s the one we have now. And that’s why I’ve been commissioned by the very same publisher to try to take advantage of our modern circumstances, where I can go anywhere and communicate anywhere, and try to bring everything up to date and make it complete and accurate.

SZ Koechel Fun Fact No. 4. Film trivia. Question: What popular romantic movie from 1970 mentions the Koechel Catalog? Answer: Love Story.

(Movie sound; quiet version of Love Story theme starts)

The ailing young Jenny, played by Ali McGraw, laments that she’s losing her recall of such intellectual matters as lines from Shakespeare’s plays.

Jenny “I went to Radcliffe, I’m supposed to remember those things. I once knew all the Mozart Koechel listings.”

(Soundtrack down)

SZ Coming up: modern Mozart sleuthwork, and a Koechel catalog for the 21st century. How will the forthcoming New Koechel Catalog update the K numbers? By adding Greek letters to the ends?

But first let’s hear more of that symphony in B-flat I mentioned a moment ago, known variously as K. 182, K. 166c and K. 173dA, take your pick.

(Music: Symphony no. 24 in Bb: Mvt 2, calm, 2:50 + Mvt 3, 2:50, upbeat.)

[Part 3]

This is K is for Koechel. I’m Sarah Zaslaw. And now . . . CSI Vienna!

(Music: start of Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat; fades by the word ‘dissertation’)

To be a musicologist is to be a detective of sorts. Right around the time the last Koechel Catalog was coming out in Europe, an American graduate student named Neal Zaslaw was seeking a case to solve, a topic, for his dissertation. … He went to his adviser and suggested Mozart. Puffing on a cigar, the professor gravely replied,

TM “I’m not sure that’s the best way to start your career, you know; all the important research on Mozart has already been done.”

SZ The student duly picked a different topic. But later, he returned to the scene, reopened the Mozart dossier, and found there was plenty more investigating to do. Since then he’s been a regular on the Mozart beat, and when the Koechel publishers decided in the 1990s to revise the list of Mozart’s works once again, they asked him to head the new international three-man editorial squad. Their volume will be called The New Koechel Catalog.

The New Koechel will reflect how far musical sleuthwork has come since the 1960s, with modern forensic science extracting the secrets of Mozart’s manuscripts. Editor Neal Zaslaw:

NZ We have better ways of figuring out what type of paper is being used, especially by looking at the watermarks, but not only the watermarks—the texture of the paper, the color of the ink, the way that the staff lines have been draw onto the paper—that enable you to date the paper with sometimes surprising accuracy. This was especially done by a man named Alan Tyson. It turns out paper was very expensive, and that it was bought in small batches, and that it changed depending on where you bought it, and that you could tell that this paper was from Prague and this paper was from Rome and this paper was something he only used in a three-year period in Vienna.

SZ So, you can date Mozart’s manuscripts by analyzing the paper he used. You can also analyze his handwriting.

NZ This was brought to an amazing peak of perfection by a German scholar named Wolfgang Plath. And Plath studied Mozart’s handwriting and discovered that it evolved, the way our handwriting does as we get older, and that there were certain shapes of clef signs and naturals and flats that only appeared in certain periods. He had a special eye for these things. He could just look at a natural sign and think, “Oh no, that can’t be 1768, it must be in the 1770s sometime,” and then he would go about investigating this various ways, till he had a chart of symbols and when they took this or that shape or the other shape.

SZ Knowing Mozart’s handwriting at all ages not only helps us pin the date on the documents. It also clarifies something his contemporaries wondered about, namely the division of labor between young Wolfgang and his father Léopold. 11

NZ There were vicious rumors going around when Mozart was a child that his father was faking it: that is, his father, who was an accomplished musician, was really writing this music and then setting up his child to look like a child genius. This, of course, is not true; but what is true is his father was his teacher, his editor, his copyist, his adviser, his manager, and his father, and you see their handwriting mixed together in very interesting ways, now that we know how to recognize the difference between them. For instance, Mozart’s First Symphony, which is, um, Koechel listing 16, which he wrote in London when he was nine or ten.

(Music: First Symphony, K. 16, Harnoncourt: start mvt 1.)

There’s a mighty battle going on between the father and the son, and there are actually two versions of the piece there that you can sort of decipher. There’s what Mozart wrote and then there’s what his father changed and there’s Mozart coming back and saying, “No, I really want this and that and the other thing.” So that’s certainly a collaboration, but one never has the idea that Mozart has no ideas and his father is pumping him up. His father’s helping him with technical things about proper harmony, good ways of handling the orchestration, and things like that.

(Symphony mvt continues and ends)

SZ Mozart’s father isn’t the only guy with whom he shares music paper, and therefore K numbers.

NZ One of the things the Mozart scholars didn’t like and tried to ignore or suppress is the fact that Mozart collaborated with people. Now, this is not what geniuses are supposed to do. But there are plenty of examples of Mozart collaborating. Mozart had various people who studied with him, with whom he collaborated on compositions. And it seems in those cases that sometimes he would give his student the idea and they would work on it and then he would help them finish it; or sometimes they would come in with an idea and he would give suggestions and they would work on it some more and then he would help them finish it. And, um, these pieces have numbers in the chronology.

SZ Even with all our expert scrutiny of what is and isn’t by Mozart, there are always going to be some blurry areas.

NZ An example of a piece that’s confusing in the counting is the Requiem. …

(Requiem, first mvt. JEGardiner/Philips.)

Mozart died while he was struggling to finish it—he had a commission, he knew he was dying, he wanted his wife and children to have the money—and after he died his wife commissioned various of his circle of musician friends to complete it. Turns out on close examination of the manuscripts, the only movement he completed is the first movement, the Requiem aeternam. … [Basses enter, “Requiem…”] … All the other movements were not complete. Now, there were a number of movements that were complete in their essentials, and so the basic substance is Mozart’s, and then there’re the movements he never got to at all. 12

This is a very strange situation. First of all, Ludwig Koechel couldn’t bear to put the word “fragment” next to this famous piece. This is an iconic piece. And so all the other fragmentary pieces, in the catalog, right next to the number, it says “fragment,” but not the Requiem. Another strange thing about it is that with our current drive for authenticity, people have been trying to perform the fragment, just what Mozart wrote, and the piece peters out. Or they try to make a new completion, there are a number of these, where somebody says, “Well, this Sussmayr really was not a very good composer, I can complete this Requiem better than he did,” and so they make brand new fantasy compositions, some of which are stunningly beautiful. …

(Requiem down)

But what’s wrong with it from a historian’s point of view is that, when you read that somebody went to a performance of the Requiem and had the following reaction, they’re not listening to a fragment, they’re not listening to a completion by Robert Levin or somebody else: they’re listening to the Sussmayr version. So “The Requiem,” with capital letters, is the one that Sussmayr completed.

SZ Speaking of unclear authorship, here’s another story the documents tell.

NZ When you start looking at Mozart’s dance music, the Salzburg dances are a mess. They’re found in a lot of manuscripts all mixed up, jumbled up with other dances, and sometimes a minuet and trio will be taken apart and connected to other minuets and trios. And it turns out that in Salzburg, Mozart and his musical friends were playing a kind of social game that involved minuets.

(Menuetto from Divertimento in F, K. 247, yes by Moz, not from a set of minuets, oh well. Philips 422 504, cd4, track6. -:47 minuet)

It seems that all year long they collected minuets that they wrote and that other people wrote and put them into large, random anthologies. And then when Carnaval season was coming, when there were going to be balls and dances, they would use these anthologies to create tidy sets of six and twelve and these would then be used by the dance band for people to dance to. One of the giveaways is that the Salzburg manuscripts have often been folded in half or in quarters in order to put them in the mail. And once you notice that, you look in Mozart’s correspondence and you actually see references to “Thank you for the minuet” or “I’m sending you such-and-such a minuet.” And so the result of that is that under Mozart’s name there are minuets by Josef Haydn, Michael Haydn, Leopold Mozart, and his sister Nannerl.

SZ Minuets for Mardi Gras! Party on!

(Minuet plays to end)

The New Koechel Catalog will record these types of advances in what we’ve learned about Mozart and his co-composers. It will also show how the things historians want to know change from generation to generation. Ask new questions, get new answers.

We’re interested now a great deal in the performance conditions under which Mozart heard his music or played it: exactly how he named each instrument, is there anything peculiar about how high it goes or how low it goes. For instance, take a very famous piece, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, everybody knows that piece.

(Eine Kleine Nachtmusik mvt 1 starts in string orch form. St. Paul Chamber Orch, McFerrin, Sony 64600.)

It’s thought to be, in our culture, an orchestral piece, that is, for a string orchestra. But actually there are clear signs in Mozart’s manuscript that it’s really for a quintet of strings (music fades): two violins, viola, cello and double bass.

(Eine Kleine Nachtmusik mvt 1 continues in string quintet form. Mvt 1 recap.)

Well, these things interest us nowadays; they didn’t used to. So when I come across information like that I’ll try to give it some emphasis in the new version of the Koechel Catalog.

(Eine Kleine mvt ends.)

Coming up: what today’s hip young Koechel numbers are wearing. I’m Sarah Zaslaw and the show is K is for Koechel, the story behind those Mozart numbers. We’re nearing the end of our hour with Mozart’s music, Koechel’s numbers, and Neal Zaslaw’s explanations of how it will all come together in the New Koechel Catalog.

Now, about the numbers. After three major editions of the Koechel Catalog, some of Mozart’s works currently bear three different K numbers, encrusted with letters and confusion. The forthcoming New Koechel Catalog could bring clarity to this system...or potentially make it even more confusing. What will the new system be? Neal Zaslaw:

NZ When it was first announced that I was going to make a new edition of the Koechel catalog, I got a lot of communications from music librarians, conductors, performers, scholars, critics, with opinions on what to do about the numbering system. About 90% of the people said, “If you change the numbers I’ll kill you. These are the numbers we know it by. It would cost retroactive conversion of all our cataloging and everything would be a nightmare, Do Not Change the numbers.” About 10% wrote me and said, “Have I got a plan for you! You should use years plus decimals. You should use genres plus other identifiers. You should just start from 1 again and get it right this time.” And so on. I mentally tried out each of these new systems and they indeed solved some of the problems in the old system and created new problems that were just as severe. So I bucked up my courage and I made the decision that we’d go back to the original numbers.

(Violin Sonata in G, K. 379, part of 3rd mvt. Podger, Cooper. Channel 21804.)

SZ So the New Koechel will simplify. Ludwig Koechel’s original numbers may not line up Mozart’s pieces in perfect chronological order, but they’re still the numbers that musicians know and love best. The Requiem will still be K. 626. Works that are out of order will be clearly flagged and their dates explained. The little A’s and big B’s will mostly disappear from the K numbers, except in the case of pieces added since Koechel’s first edition. And the word “chronological” will vanish from the title. 14

The final push of research and writing on the project is set for 2006; the New Koechel Thematic Catalog of the Complete Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart should appear in print not long after that.

(Violin sonata section ends)

Koechel Fun Fact No. 5. Mozart’s name.

(Piano Sonata in C, K. 545, part of 2nd mvt. Pommier. Virgin.)

The title of the Koechel catalog refers to Mozart as Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. Why Amadé, not Amadeus? Well, that’s what Mozart used. But in fact, neither one appears on Mozart’s birth certificate. He was officially baptized, complete with churchy Latin endings, as: Johannes, Chrysostomus, Wolfgangus, Theophilus Mozart. Mozart himself never used the Johannes Chrysostomus part. Theophilus—“theo” plus “philus”—is Greek for “beloved of God”…and he didn’t use that either. Instead, he most often signed as his middle name the French version of that phrase, Amadé, or occasionally the Italian, Amadeo. Once or twice he signed a letter Amadeus, but that was tongue-in-cheek, to sound pompous. It was only after his death that others started seriously calling him Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

SZ So, um, where are we at then for the total number of Mozart’s works? Ludwig Koechel’s initial figure was 626. Now that the catalog has shed pieces that probably aren’t by Mozart and gained pieces that really are by him, has the official tally moved up or down? Neal Zaslaw:

NZ I’m afraid that if you’re going to limit the list of pieces to works that are by Mozart and that he completed, we’ve added a tiny number of pieces and we’ve had to take out a large number. The number has shrunk. Now if you put in the fragmentary pieces that were complete enough that they’ve been easily finished by other musicians, then maybe it’s a wash, maybe we’re up around 600.

(Music creeps in - end of Magic Flute Overture)

SZ So the precise number of pieces by Mozart remains elusive. When the New Koechel Catalog comes out, you can take a look and count ’em up on your own fingers however you like. And that’ll be your answer until the next, even more definitive revision of Ludwig Koechel’s catalog. Meanwhile, remember: Mozart by any other numbers would sound as sweet. . . .

You’ve been listening to K is for Koechel, a production of Georgia Public Broadcasting, GPB. This program was written and produced by Sarah Zaslaw, with assistance from Susanna Capelouto, Taylor Lewis, and Terrance McKnight. Special thanks to Neal Zaslaw, a.k.a. Dad. . . . I welcome your thoughts about K is for Koechel. Please e-mail your comments or questions to [email protected], or call Georgia Public Broadcasting, at 1-800-222-4788. . . .

(Music rolls victoriously to the end!)

[GPB stinger: TL’s voice]