Thread - Collections

Here's the official IMSLP working defintion (it probably should be posted somewhere): Any publication or assembly of pieces which are not obviously intended to be performed in one setting. As I mentioned to Notenschreiber when he was setting up the catalog numbers for Sterkel, nearly everything except large works (like operas) was issued in a collection before Beethoven's lifetime, often with a bewildering number of conflicting opus numbers (copyright was basically highly local, if existing at all) by a large number of publishers. This was due to the high cost of paper (all basically made by hand) plus the physical size of the sheets and the number of sheets sold as a unit. It wasn't very practical to publish a single C.P.E. Bach sonata given the set-up time on a press and the sheets needed to be printed to use the allotted ink on the plates, so they were typically issued in groups (6 or 3). The creator of the Sterkel numbers rather dropped the ball by assigning a single number to a collection containing three sonatas, since here is no evidence they were intended to be performed as one piece (decimals will be added when individual pages are created for the separate works). Even with the Bach's WTC, which was organized as 2 disctinct units and carefully ordered by the composer, note that Schmieder assigned separate BWV numbers for each prelude and fugue. (Thank heaven he did or our pages for both WTC's would be in serious trouble performance-wise).

By the time Beethoven came along this was starting to change - and Beethoven's pieces tended to exceed those of the earlier composers in page counts anyway. With his string quartets, note the first six came out as a single opus number but each work had its own by the end of his life. In the 19th century you often encounter a mix of things, but the thing which are technically collections either might have been intended for a single hearing or they're short enough that its not clear if they're one or the other (songs, sets of pieces for piano, etc.). There is an occasional need to have a collection page under both tabs (compositions and collections) but that's the exception. The long term plan is to have a page for each work, with collections reserved for the older volumes as originally issued. So, don't remove a collection designation if someone has already placed it there unless it's really something intended as a single work. Opus numbers are not necesaarily indicative of it being a work, and more likely to assigned to a published collection for composers before Beethoven's era.