How are your Köchels?

In the world of musicology, I doubt anyone is quite so famous as Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, pictured left. That's because he catalogued Mozart's music in the 1860s and thus bestowed on every Mozart composition then known the 'K' numbers that have adorned them ever since. Mozart, of course, being the veritable God of classical music, Herr Köchel therefore has acquired some of his glory by reflection!

So, whilst non-musicologists might talk about Mozart's Symphony No. 41 -or, conceivably, his Jupiter symphony- those in tune with their inner Köchels know it as K 551. Similarly, Mozart's Requiem is now given the Köchel number K 626. [...] 

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Sorting Vivaldi!

Antonio Vivaldi's one of those composers most people have heard something of, even if they don't know who or what... though my betting is that it's likely to be one of the Four Seasons violin concerti!

His ready popularity with those four concerti makes it temptingly easy to dismiss him as a lightweight -or, worse, a repetitive lightweight. Stravinsky famously did, for example, when he said that, "Vivaldi is greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over." Note, by the way, that he did not say "he didn’t actually compose 500 concertos, he just wrote the same concerto 500 times": no-one's quite sure where that joke came from -or why the number 500 is sometimes given as 400- but in whatever form, it's not Stravinsky's. [...] 

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