is offering you the complete list of compositions as well as brief biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Dieterich Buxtehude, Frédéric Chopin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner and Clara Wieck-Schumann.

You can call all themes, motifs and measures at the beginning of a piece as scores, and you can have them played. You’ll find them either with the help of a search form by entering the opus number, the title, the lyrics, the genre, the instrumentation or the year of composition, or, you will be able to find a theme whose provenance you don’t remember by playing it on the keyboard on the computer screen, without regard of the key in which it was originally written. Tips and hints for these options are on the search form. The computer will look through the index of works of a single or of several composers selected, and you’ll sometimes find quite astonishing similarities: for example, the famous theme by Mozart Là ci darem la mano (KV 527-9) appears already in a work by Bach, note for note, and also, as is expected, in the variations several other composers have written around it.

The themes given here were extracted directly from the original scores; they are not necessarily identical to those given in the published indexes. Thus, you’ll find here not only the beginning of a piece, i.e. the incipit, but also secondary themes and motifs, and often several of them in a single movement. We have kept the usual numbering for a piece of music (e.g. Mozart’s op. 2 = KV 2) and added a number for the movement of the piece (e.g. Mozart op. 14-1) and letters for the themes in a movement (e.g. Mozart op. 320-1b).

We’ll gladly answer all your questions. If you are well acquainted with the oeuvre of one of your favorite composers we should like to invite you to contribute to this Index. Please write us: wseufert@videotron.ca