From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Opus
or the shortened form
op.
after the title of a piece of
music
means “work”. It is followed by a number. When a
composer
writes their first piece of music it is followed by the term “opus 1”. The next
composition
would then be called “opus 2”, etc.
Giving pieces of music opus numbers helps us to identify which piece of music (from a certain composer) that composition is. For example:
Beethoven
wrote lots of
piano
sonatas
. His first Piano sonata in
A flat major
has the opus number of op.26. This shows that he wrote this sonata when he was young in his composing career. Many years later, he wrote another piano sonata which is also in A flat major, and this piece one has the opus number of 110 (op. 110).
You cannot always tell from a composer’s opus numbers the order in which the works were composed. Until around the end of the
18th century
, opus numbers were only given to pieces of music which were published.
Some
musicologists
(people who study and write about music) have studied all the works by a famous
composer
and have given them a catalogue number. For example
Mozart’s
music does not have opus numbers. Some of them are long
operas
, others are tiny little pieces for the piano he might have written in a hurry one day. A man called
Kochel
made a list of every single work by Mozart and gave them
K numbers
(K for Kochel). His numbering goes up to 622. This is useful, for example, to tell the difference between his
Symphony
in
G minor
K183 and his Symphony in G minor K550.
The plural of “opus” is “opuses” in English. This is because the
Latin
plural is
opera
which is rather confusing to English speakers as the word is already used in musical terminology.
The word "opus" can also refer to the "work" of an artist. (For example: "This opus was composed by Chopin," or "This opus is the last Piano sonata that Beethoven composed")
An artist's "
magnum opus
" means his or her "greatest" work.