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[Lavie]

Bonjour !

Je cherche de l'info sur l'histoire des numéros d'oeuvre... (Par exemple, BWV 772). Depuis quand fonctionne ce système ? Qui décide ?

[Gracou]

Il s'agit de catalogues thématiques qui ont souvent été effectués par des musicologues. Par exemple pour Bach, le musicologue allemand Wolfgang Schmieder avait entrepris de numéroter toutes les oeuvres de Bach. Un petit lien vers Wikipédia pour être plus complet:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_thematique

[Lavie]

Merci beaucoup !

Ce lien m'a amené vers celui-ci intéressant également :

Early usage

In the arts, opus number usually denotes a work of musical composition, a practice and usage established in the seventeenth century when composers identified their works with an opus number. In the nineteenth century, publishers usually assigned opus numbers when publishing groups of like compositions, usually in sets of three-, six-, and twelve compositions. Consequently, opus numbers are not usually in chronological order, unpublished compositions usually had no opus number, and numeration gaps and sequential duplications occurred when publishers issued contemporaneous editions of a composer’s works, as in the sets of string quartets by Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827); Haydn's Op. 76, the Erdödy quartets (1796–97), comprises six discrete quartets consecutively numbered Op. 76 No. 1 – Op. 76 No. 6; whilst Beethoven's Op. 59, the Rasumovsky quartets (1805–06), comprises String Quartet No. 7, String Quartet No. 8, and String Quartet No. 9.


19th century to date

From about 1800, composers, especially Ludwig van Beethoven, assigned an opus number to a work, and later to a set of works, especially songs and short piano pieces; however, composers’ inconsistent usages ended the correspondence between an opus number and the work’s publication date. Since approximately 1900, composers tended to assign an opus number to a composition, published or not. Early in his career, Beethoven selectively enumerated his compositions (some published without opus numbers), yet in later years, he published early works with high opus numbers. Likewise, some posthumously published works were given high opus numbers by publishers, even though some of them were written early in Beethoven's career. Since his death in 1827, the un-numbered compositions have been catalogued and labelled with the German acronym WoO (Werk ohne Opuszahl), meaning "work without opus number". However, there are other catalogues of Beethoven's works - see Catalogues of Beethoven compositions.

The practice of enumerating a posthumous opus (Op. posth.) is noteworthy in the case of Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47); after his death, the heirs published many compositions with opus numbers Mendelssohn did not assign them. In life, he published three symphonies, Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 11; Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 52; and Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56, yet, he chronologically wrote symphonies between symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, which he withdrew for personal and compositional reasons; nevertheless, the Mendelssohn heirs published (and catalogued) them as the Italian Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90 and as the Reformation Symphony No. 5 in D major and D minor, Op. 107.

While many of the works of Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) were given opus numbers, these did not always bear a logical relationship to the order in which they were either written or published. To achieve better sales, some publishers such as N. Simrock preferred to present budding composers as being well established, by giving some relatively early works much higher opus numbers than their chronological order would merit. In other cases, Dvořák deliberately provided new works with lower opus numbers to be able to sell them outside contract obligations to other publishers. This way it could happen that the same opus number was given to more than one of his works. A good example is the opus number 12, which was assigned, successively, to five different works (an opera, a concert overture, a string quartet, and two unrelated piano works). In yet other cases, the same work was given as many as three different opus numbers by different publishers. The sequential numbering of his symphonies has also been confused: (a) they were initially numbered by order of publication, not composition; (b) the first four symphonies to be composed were published after the last five; and (c) the last five symphonies were not published in order of composition. The New World Symphony was originally published as No. 5, was later known as No. 8, and definitively renumbered as No. 9 in the critical editions published in the 1950s.

Other examples of composers' historically-inconsistent opus number usages include the cases of César Franck (1822–1890) and Béla Bartók (1881–1945) who initially enumerated, but then discontinued enumerating, their compositions. Carl Nielsen (1865–1931) and Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) were also inconsistent in their approaches. Moreover, Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) was a consistent enumerator who assigned an opus number to a composition before composing it; at his death he left fragmentary and planned — but numbered — works. In revising a composition, Prokofiev occasionally assigned a new opus number to the revision, thus: Symphony No. 4 is two thematically-related but discrete works: (i) Symphony No. 4, Op. 47, and (ii) Symphony No. 4, Op. 112; the former, Op. 47, was written in 1929; the latter, Op. 112, is a large-scale revision written in 1947. Like-wise, depending upon the edition, the original version of Piano Sonata No. 5 in C major, is twice catalogued as: (i) Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 38, and as (ii) Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 135.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_number