On the number of Mozart sonatas
March 1, 2024 4:42 PM Subscribe
I have this Schirmer's Library book of Mozart sonatas. It seems to use a different convention for numbering sonatas than the rest of the world. For example, it identifies k.300i as Sonata 16, but it's conventionally known as Sonata 11. Meanwhile, the famous k.545 is called Sonata 3 in my book, but elsewhere is Sonata 16. Why the discrepancy?
You might hope the page I photographed, titled "A note on the numbering of the sonatas", would explain this, but it does not.
You might hope the page I photographed, titled "A note on the numbering of the sonatas", would explain this, but it does not.
Best answer: I can't directly vouch for this but one of the one star reviews from a self-described piano instructor says "The numbering system used for this edition is a version of the Koechel Verzeichnis seventy years obsolete". I'd recommend reading that one star review as it has some other potentially important issues mentioned in it like wrong notes and missing sonatas.
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 6:33 PM on March 1, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 6:33 PM on March 1, 2024 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Ah, yes. A two-star review answers the question:
The numbering of the sonatas is awry by modern standards. The numbering of the sonatas was revised by the Neue Mozart Ausgabe in 1951, which is the numbering system now in use by most people. Sadly, this edition still uses older numberings, despite having had 70 years to revise this. As the Kochel "K" catalogue numbers are not printed on the score, this makes an already hefty volume very difficult to navigate.
1951! So the sonata numbers have been out-dated for 73 years. Guess I ought to buy a different book.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:37 PM on March 1, 2024
The numbering of the sonatas is awry by modern standards. The numbering of the sonatas was revised by the Neue Mozart Ausgabe in 1951, which is the numbering system now in use by most people. Sadly, this edition still uses older numberings, despite having had 70 years to revise this. As the Kochel "K" catalogue numbers are not printed on the score, this makes an already hefty volume very difficult to navigate.
1951! So the sonata numbers have been out-dated for 73 years. Guess I ought to buy a different book.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:37 PM on March 1, 2024
Best answer: I showed this to my teenage son. if there's anything he loves more than classical music, it's the quirks of the history of classical music composers and their compositions, and so he went waaaaaay down the rabbit hole on this.
Looks like you already figured it out in the meantime, but I don't have the heart to waste his effort, so here it is:
---
First, some clarifications: Mozart wrote 18 piano sonatas. The 19th one is actually just an arrangement of one of his violin sonatas (iirc it was common practice back then for composers to rewrite their old pieces to make a quick buck) and the 20th one was misattributed and is currently believed to have been written by August Eberhard Mueller. The Schirmer book includes 19 and 20, but skips 17 (perhaps because an early printed edition added a random violin part and now we're unsure how much of the rest of it is genuine Mozart? that's just my conjecture I actually have no clue why they skipped it)
The "Koechel-Verzeichnis" (the numbers prefixed with K.) is a catalogue, in chronological order, of all 600+ pieces that Mozart ever wrote. These Koechel numbers have undergone way too many revisions, to the point where the standard way to label a piece is with two K numbers (the one from the 1st edition and the one from the 6th edition) so no one gets confused. This means that the one-star Amazon review complaining about outdated Koechel numbering is really just pointless snobbery.
The ordering (and thus the 1-18 numbering) of the 18 sonatas has remained almost unchanged between the 1st and 6th editions of the Koechel catalogue. The one exception is that 8 and 9 swapped places. No one cared and so we just kept using the ordering based on the 1st edition of Koechel.
Now for the actual question of the numbering. Somehow, it got even more complicated.
I attempted to reference this PDF scan of what I'm pretty sure is the exact same book... but the numbering at the top of each piece wasn't the same as the numbering from the photo of the appendix you posted. For example, the sonata conventionally numbered 16 is number 3 in the appendix but number 1 in the PDF scan.
I ended up making a table with the conventional number, the Koechel 1st and 6th edition numbers, the appendix photo numbers, and the PDF scan numbers, to try to find some sort of pattern. I came up empty-handed, but I might as well share the table just in case someone else is able to figure it out. Good luck.
(note from dad -- MetaFilter isn't reading his table formatting; if anyone wants to see the table, MeMail me and I'll send it to you.)
PS: Here's a PDF scan of a nice modern edition of the 18 Mozart sonatas. With the correct numbers.
posted by martin q blank at 9:55 PM on March 1, 2024 [10 favorites]
Looks like you already figured it out in the meantime, but I don't have the heart to waste his effort, so here it is:
---
First, some clarifications: Mozart wrote 18 piano sonatas. The 19th one is actually just an arrangement of one of his violin sonatas (iirc it was common practice back then for composers to rewrite their old pieces to make a quick buck) and the 20th one was misattributed and is currently believed to have been written by August Eberhard Mueller. The Schirmer book includes 19 and 20, but skips 17 (perhaps because an early printed edition added a random violin part and now we're unsure how much of the rest of it is genuine Mozart? that's just my conjecture I actually have no clue why they skipped it)
The "Koechel-Verzeichnis" (the numbers prefixed with K.) is a catalogue, in chronological order, of all 600+ pieces that Mozart ever wrote. These Koechel numbers have undergone way too many revisions, to the point where the standard way to label a piece is with two K numbers (the one from the 1st edition and the one from the 6th edition) so no one gets confused. This means that the one-star Amazon review complaining about outdated Koechel numbering is really just pointless snobbery.
The ordering (and thus the 1-18 numbering) of the 18 sonatas has remained almost unchanged between the 1st and 6th editions of the Koechel catalogue. The one exception is that 8 and 9 swapped places. No one cared and so we just kept using the ordering based on the 1st edition of Koechel.
Now for the actual question of the numbering. Somehow, it got even more complicated.
I attempted to reference this PDF scan of what I'm pretty sure is the exact same book... but the numbering at the top of each piece wasn't the same as the numbering from the photo of the appendix you posted. For example, the sonata conventionally numbered 16 is number 3 in the appendix but number 1 in the PDF scan.
I ended up making a table with the conventional number, the Koechel 1st and 6th edition numbers, the appendix photo numbers, and the PDF scan numbers, to try to find some sort of pattern. I came up empty-handed, but I might as well share the table just in case someone else is able to figure it out. Good luck.
(note from dad -- MetaFilter isn't reading his table formatting; if anyone wants to see the table, MeMail me and I'll send it to you.)
PS: Here's a PDF scan of a nice modern edition of the 18 Mozart sonatas. With the correct numbers.
posted by martin q blank at 9:55 PM on March 1, 2024 [10 favorites]
Best answer: Just a word to the wise - Schirmer editions tend to be universally considered to be pretty terrible. That would be, considered by pianists, piano teachers, musicologists, etc. The basic problem is that Schirmer built up a big catalog in like the late 1800s, a little bit in the early 1900s, and then they have been just coasting on that from then until now.
And the problem is, that about the time they stopped doing any work and just kept continuing the reprints, is exactly the time when modern ideas about more authentic, historically-informed performance practice and fidelity to the original score (e.g., urtext editions) were just starting to be developed.
So what you tend to get is pretty sloppy editions, based on old, often inaccurate editions and unaware of modern scholarship that makes more accurate manuscripts (ie, closer to the original composer rather than a copy of a copy of a copy type of thing) available.
And on top of that, editors of the era had a strongly romantic-period view of piano performance, which is slathered on rather thickly on top of the original manuscript & notation, so that you have no way of know what in your manuscript came from Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc, and what came from J. Edmund Snedgras, editor with many interesting ideas.
So they are the type of thing you might look at to see if it might have some interesting and unusual performance ideas you might like to try (and 99% of the time, discard). Or for example if you wanted to know what Romantic-era interpretation might look like. But you would do that AFTER first consulting and study a good Urtext edition - so that you know what is the composer's idea what is the editor's suggestion.
There is the odd exception - Kirkpatrick's edition of the Scarlatti Sonatas is excellent, and also published by Schirmer. (I've played a bunch of those myself and my Schirmer edition is laying about the house somewhere at this very moment.) Some of their late Romantic-era work is well worth looking at - because it's a late Romantic composer being edited by an expert late-Romantic editor and a positive synergy instead of the usual negative one. And there are a few other exceptions - some outlined in this thread.
But as a rule with few exceptions, the Schirmer edition is the last one you look at, not the first. They are cheap but that's where their main virtues end. You most often can't even rely on them to get the main notes and markings right. And with the advent of IMSLP there is little reason to save a couple of nickels by turning to the cheapest edition you can buy. (Though beware that Schirmer is often one of the main editions available at IMSLP since almost all are old enough to be out of copyright. And they are not any better just because they can be downloaded for free . . . )
posted by flug at 12:53 AM on March 2, 2024 [11 favorites]
And the problem is, that about the time they stopped doing any work and just kept continuing the reprints, is exactly the time when modern ideas about more authentic, historically-informed performance practice and fidelity to the original score (e.g., urtext editions) were just starting to be developed.
So what you tend to get is pretty sloppy editions, based on old, often inaccurate editions and unaware of modern scholarship that makes more accurate manuscripts (ie, closer to the original composer rather than a copy of a copy of a copy type of thing) available.
And on top of that, editors of the era had a strongly romantic-period view of piano performance, which is slathered on rather thickly on top of the original manuscript & notation, so that you have no way of know what in your manuscript came from Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc, and what came from J. Edmund Snedgras, editor with many interesting ideas.
So they are the type of thing you might look at to see if it might have some interesting and unusual performance ideas you might like to try (and 99% of the time, discard). Or for example if you wanted to know what Romantic-era interpretation might look like. But you would do that AFTER first consulting and study a good Urtext edition - so that you know what is the composer's idea what is the editor's suggestion.
There is the odd exception - Kirkpatrick's edition of the Scarlatti Sonatas is excellent, and also published by Schirmer. (I've played a bunch of those myself and my Schirmer edition is laying about the house somewhere at this very moment.) Some of their late Romantic-era work is well worth looking at - because it's a late Romantic composer being edited by an expert late-Romantic editor and a positive synergy instead of the usual negative one. And there are a few other exceptions - some outlined in this thread.
But as a rule with few exceptions, the Schirmer edition is the last one you look at, not the first. They are cheap but that's where their main virtues end. You most often can't even rely on them to get the main notes and markings right. And with the advent of IMSLP there is little reason to save a couple of nickels by turning to the cheapest edition you can buy. (Though beware that Schirmer is often one of the main editions available at IMSLP since almost all are old enough to be out of copyright. And they are not any better just because they can be downloaded for free . . . )
posted by flug at 12:53 AM on March 2, 2024 [11 favorites]
Response by poster: The table of sonatas from martin q blank's son
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:26 AM on March 2, 2024 [4 favorites]
Conventional number K 1st ed K 6th ed Appendix PDF scan ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1 279 189d 8 5 2 280 189e 2 6 3 281 189f 6 8 4 282 189g 17 19 5 283 189h 5 2 6 284 205b 9 15 7 309 284b 10 11 8 310 300d 14 16 9 311 284c 12 13 10 330 300h 11 3 11 331 300i 16 9 12 332 300k 1 7 13 333 315c 7 10 14 457 457 18 18 15 533 494 4 17 16 545 545 3 1 17 570 570 missing missing 18 576 576 15 14 19 (arr. of vln sonata) Anh. 135 547a 13 4 20 (actually by Mueller) Anh. 136 498a 19 12
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:26 AM on March 2, 2024 [4 favorites]
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posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 4:43 PM on March 1, 2024