Ludwig von Köchel and the Köchel Catalog

KV Online will be a gateway to all digital Mozart resources at the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, created and hosted there with support of the Packard Humanities Institute. As of today, only core data (such as titles, dates, scoring) and links to the Digital Mozarteum Edition are fully functional. Please visit us again to see how the digital version of the Köchel Catalog develops over time!

Ludwig von Köchel was a fascinating personality and pedagogue with manifold interests, from law to botany and mineralogy, from literature to music. After his university studies he served as the private teacher of the children of Archduke Karl of Austria. A generous pension enabled a life as an independent scholar from 1842 on.

The Köchel Catalog was the first thematic scholarly catalog of a major composer’s oeuvre and has since been serving as the model for most thematic catalogs. Köchel was determined to depict Mozart’s development from a prodigy child to the great master. This development is reflected in the numbering system, which covered 626 works, ending with the unfinished Requiem.

The Köchel Catalog was substantially revised in 1905, 1937, and 1964, respectively, showing each time the enormous progress that generations of Mozart scholars achieved. But new results regarding composition dates required adaptation of numbers to reflect chronology. This led to complications from one edition to the next. This problem has been overcome in the 2024 edition that, for all authentic works, goes back to the earliest number they ever had in the main body of the catalog. Consequently, 95 new numbers could be assigned to compositions which had never had a number in the main body of the catalog so far, starting from KV 627.