Что означает слово «опус» применительно к musical culture? The history of the word, its theoretical substantiation as a musical term, its modern meaning - all this later in the article.
In our linguistic culture, the word “opus” was fixed mainly in two semantic meanings:
Since the first option is clear, try to deal with the second.
At the heart of the word "music" is the concept of "musical work", but the second is not identical to the first and has historical boundaries.
There is music as a work, and this is connected with the written tradition; and there is music, as an activity associated with improvisational reproduction of its samples.
Это разграничение впервые было зафиксировано в treatise N. Listenius "Musica" in 1537. It was in this treatise that it was first stated that an opus is “a written, fully finished work”. Thus, for the first time a new concept of “opus” was recorded.
In the first millennium of Christianity, the oral formmusic dominated so much that even the term "improvisation" did not exist, because there was no alternative. The development of two variants of creativity in music began only from the 9-10th centuries, when the first copies appeared recorded on paper.
During this period of the Middle Ages, “opus” music andThe “practice” still existed in parallel, all the events of human life were accompanied by the play of musicians and often the performer alternated his own compositions with strangers, without feeling a sharp distinction between these concepts.
Important was the skill of combining alreadywell-established formulas, the same motives freely migrated from one work to another, and this was not considered plagiarism. Talent manifested itself in the way of processing the material.
Постепенно стали всё больше цениться элементы novelties in the work, such a creation of new, previously non-existent tunes, became known as "writing". In this sense, the history of the development of European musical professional art is no different from the processes that took place on other continents.
The principal difference lies only in the fact that it is in Europe that the written creativity, here was born the only one in the worldwritten musical culture. And it changed everything: a new concept of musical art, aesthetic criteria appeared, the psychology of creativity and auditory settings changed, methods of teaching music to the profession were created.
Along with the uniqueness of musical compositionthe notion of “composer” - the creator of a new work. The next natural step was the creation of autonomous music, which was no longer associated with any domestic needs, but was valuable in itself.
The German philosopher and theorist of music of the twentieth century Karl Dalhauz identifies the following attributes that define the concept of "opus":
Another German music theorist, Hans Eggebrecht, gave a more precise definition of the concept “composition”, writing that “opus” is:
Today, opus is no longer justComposition, recorded notes on paper. The word “opus” means that the work was published and in the process of publication a certain number was assigned to it. Depending on the time when the music was published, the opus may have a greater or lesser numerical expression.
If during the life of the composer some of histhe works were never published and, accordingly, do not have their own opus, then it is assigned the name “posthumous opus”, that is, the one that was published after the death of the author.
The number of the opus does not always reflect the time of writing.works. If it was written in the early period of creativity, and published for the first time after many years, then the number of the opus will be assigned to it later. For example, written by Beethoven when he was young, Rondo “Fury over lost pennies” has a late opus number of 129.
Sometimes the composer publishes severalworks. All of them are assigned one opus number, but different sequence numbers. For example, 24 preludes of Chopin are published as opus 28, but they have different sequence numbers from 1 to 24. Thus, the expressions: “Chopin is the fifth prelude” and “Chopin - opus 28, No. 5” mean the same thing.
