Opus 1 Revisited

 Op. 1 isn't where Beethoven started. I didn't really think he did but there must be a point for all of us where the 'early work' is over and the 'grown up' work has begun and for someone like Beethoven his first published pieces could be counted as that. And so what it says here on Aug 18th still largely stands except that such catalogue numbers can be treacherous if taken at face value.

I'm aware that the Mendelssohn symphonies were not written one after the other but overlapped with each other without quite all being written at the same time. Biographies of James Joyce show how Dubliners, Stephen Hero, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses did not represent the chronological development that their artistic sequence appears to and they were to some degree all in preparation at the same time.

The catalogues of composers works are complicated partly by later discoveries needing to be assigned numbers and early works being published posthumously- opus numbers usually being an order of publication rather than composition. It's for the best if we don't renumber everything to accommodate new pieces in the lists or else those few that I still remember, like k. 545, will be something else forever after.

Thus, Beethoven's WoO numbers are, paradoxically, opus numbers for Works Without Opus Numbers and WoO 1 is from 1790 but WoO 63 is Nine Variations from 1782, when he was 11, and so while acquiring The New Grove Beethoven at least partly for the purposes of that list among the indices has proved worthwhile it has brought with it further questions that one could do without, that are more properly the business of a devoted musicologist and not just somebody who enjoys a good concert.