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Because the most recent printing of the catalog is called the "eighth" edition, even though there have been only four-and-a-half editions to date (see "A Brief History of the Köchel Catalog" in Neal Zaslaw, Mozart Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception [Oxford: Clarendon, 1989], 558-61), and because I felt it necessary to replace the prose from previous editions in favor of a completely new text, I call this edition "The New Köchel." Fortunately, Ulrich Konrad and Cliff Eisen agreed to act as associate editors for this vast undertaking, and I am also benefiting from the generous contributions of dozens of other scholars in America and Europe.
A brief review of the history of Mozart catalogs may give a sense of the issues and challenges facing this project. The decades following Mozart's death in 1791 saw several attempts at an inventory of his compositions, but it was not until 1862 that the Viennese botanist, mineralogist, and educator Ludwig von Köchel succeeded in this enterprise. Köchel's stout book of 551 pages was entitled (in German) Chronological-Thematic Catalog of the Complete Musical Works of WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART. With an Accounting of His Lost, Incomplete, Arranged, Doubtful, and Spurious Compositions. This, the first rigorously scholarly thematic catalog ever, has served as a model for cataloging the works of many great composers. As his title suggests, Köchel took those works attributed to Mozart which 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 played to and transcribed by his father, to 626, the unfinished Requiem. 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 apparently 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 Mass, and 35 when he died in the harness.
Chronological disadvantages
Yet the disadvantages of the chronological arrangement are also considerable. For one, as every Köchel number implies a date, a work cannot be entered into the catalog without being dated, even in cases without a reliable basis for it. This system has occasionally forced even the soberest scholar into fanciful speculation. Köchel's method of numbering is also unaccommodating to revisions in chronology. In many instances, new research has redated works in earlier editions of the catalog, declared previously spurious works authentic, or authentic ones spurious. Yet the alteration of a single number would potentially force a renumbering of all subsequent compositions. It would also sever links that for some time now have inextricably joined specific numbers to specific works (like K. 527 and Don Giovanni, for example, or K. 550 and the Symphony No. 40 in G minor). The solution in the three earlier editions of Köchel (1905, 1937, and 1964) avoided the latter of these inconveniences, but added another in its place: many works have two or even three numbers, as in the case of Mozart's Symphony No. 24, in B-flat major, which goes by K. 182, 166c, and 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. To be sure, the image of Mozart as a swift composer is supported by evidence from Mozart himself as well from his family and circle of friends and professional acquaintances. Yet this image, which pervades not only musical literature but also writings about the creative process in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and artificial intelligence, achieved legendary status in part through a notorious forgery of 1815 -- a spurious letter, published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and soon translated into English, French, and Italian -- 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. Recently, for instance, Edward Rothstein in his Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1995) and Roger Penrose in his best-selling The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) have based important points upon the false letter of 1815. Recall the scene in Peter Shaffer'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 savant dictated to by God. This scene is based (at second hand following Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri) on that forgery. One need only read the genuine letters Mozart wrote while composing Idomeneo in 1780 or Die Entführung aus dem Serail in 1782 to see, in contrast, the practical concerns, conscious deliberations, and sustained effort that Mozart brought to composition.
Search for the definitive version
But what has all this to do with 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 catalog. 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 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, that unity and perfection would be destroyed. Thus the search for the definitive version, or, as it is called in German, the Urtext or Fassung letzter Hand. 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 work.
Alas for this scenario, none of the pre-conditions hold. Despite mountains of historical data, we do not have complete, accurate documentation for every work. Further, in recent years Ulrich Konrad's painstaking research has revealed that, even though Mozart and his wife destroyed many of them, sketches or drafts remain for one in ten of his completed works. Then there are the 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, as Robert Marshall has pointed out. And Alan Tyson has shown that a number of completed works prove to have been begun, set aside, and then returned to months or years later. What is more, 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. Since Mozart worked on some compositions over a period of days, weeks, months, or occasionally years, and since he would sometimes alter a work when reusing it (like Idomeneo), we now know that 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. This revised understanding of Mozart's compositional process makes a linear chronology difficult to construct and potentially misleading no matter how carefully handled.
A workable compromise
Having to make a new version of Köchel's catalog, and faced with these difficulties, I considered several other means of organization. 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 other appendices the dozen or so additional works of questionable authenticity, by returning to an appendix the sketches, drafts, and fragments that editions of the catalog 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. At the same time, with spurious and questionable works pruned away, they may glimpse a truer image of Mozart's accomplishments and the mysteries of the creative process.
Neal Zaslaw (naz2@cornell.edu), Herbert Gussman Professor of Music at Cornell University, is co-editor of The Compleat Mozart and author of Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception.
Reprinted from the Mozart Society of America Newsletter, Volume 1, Number 1, January 27, 1997.
© 1997 by the author. By permission of the publisher.