Ludwig Ritter von Köchel

• 1. Introduction

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  Ludwig Ritter von Köchel was born on the 14th of January 1800 in Stein, Lower Austria, and today his initials appear on nearly every piece of music Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ever wrote. Pick up any sheet music for the Jupiter Symphony and you will find the letters KV, followed by the number 551. Those two letters stand for Köchel-Verzeichnis, the catalogue Köchel published in 1862. Without his work, the hundreds of works Mozart left behind would have no universally agreed order, no common numbering, no way for scholars and performers to say with certainty which piece they are discussing. Yet the man behind those letters was not, by training, a musician at all. He studied law in Vienna and spent years as a private tutor. He was also a botanist whose fieldwork ranged from North Africa to Russia. How did a polymath who never made music his profession come to give Mozart's catalogue to the world?

• 2. A Scholar for Hire

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  Köchel graduated with a PhD from Vienna in 1827, and his first sustained occupation was tutoring the four sons of Archduke Charles of Austria. That position lasted fifteen years. Archduke Charles was one of the most prominent figures in the Austrian imperial family, and serving as tutor to his household placed Köchel close to aristocratic patronage for a long stretch of his adult life. At the end of that service he was rewarded with a knighthood and a generous financial settlement. The knighthood gave him the title Ritter von Köchel. The settlement gave him something rarer still: the means to spend the rest of his life as a private scholar, pursuing whatever subjects called to him, without needing a salary.

• 3. Botanist and Traveller

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  Contemporary scientists were greatly impressed by Köchel's botanical researches, which took him to North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the United Kingdom, the North Cape, and Russia. That range alone is striking. The North Cape sits at the northernmost tip of Europe; North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula lie far to the south and west. Köchel was drawing botanical data from terrain that varied as widely as terrain could vary. Beyond botany he was also drawn to geology and mineralogy. He was, in other words, a field scientist as much as a library scholar. His curiosity ran in several directions at once, and the financial independence he had earned through years of tutoring made it possible to follow all of them.

• 4. The Catalogue of Mozart

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  In 1862, Köchel published the Köchel catalogue: a chronological and thematic register of all of Mozart's known works. It was the first catalogue of any composer undertaken on such a scale and with such rigorous scholarship behind it. Mozart's works are now routinely identified by their KV-numbers in the same way other composers' works are identified by opus numbers. The Jupiter Symphony, officially Symphony No. 41, carries the designation KV. 551. While Köchel was compiling his catalogue, the scholar Otto Jahn was independently assembling a comprehensive collection of Mozart materials and writing a scholarly biography of Mozart. When Jahn learned of Köchel's project, he turned his collection over to Köchel rather than compete with him. Köchel dedicated the finished catalogue to Jahn in recognition of that generosity.

• 5. Categories and Legacy

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  Köchel did not stop at assigning numbers. He also arranged Mozart's works into twenty-four categories. Those categories were adopted by the publisher Breitkopf and Härtel when they produced the first complete printed edition of Mozart's works, a project that ran from 1877 to 1910. Köchel partly funded that venture himself. He died of cancer on the 3rd of June 1877 in Vienna, at the age of 77, the same year the Breitkopf and Härtel edition began to appear. His catalogue has undergone revisions since its first publication, as new research has adjusted the dating and attribution of certain works. He also catalogued the works of Johann Fux, though it is his Mozart catalogue that carried his initials into every concert hall where Mozart's music is played.