Hello world! The song titles are in English (for Mr. Supervisor and Charles), the German and the Polish ones for all of us and the rest of the world (heehee). You may delete the German title field to save disk space. Enjoy! This is the tabbed ASCII version of the database. Fields have fixed beginning points. Separators are spaces (ASCII 32). INTRODUCTION ============ 1. This is a database. I did NOT include any recommendations, cuz I believe that a database has data in it and data is objective; otherwise it would be a beliefbase. If someone can't live without it, call the Public Health Department and report your problem. ;-) 2. Dates are written in the form: year/month/day (e. g. 1994/4/1) or: year/time of the year (e. g. 1994/spring) or: year (e. g. 2001) "-" means "to": 2001/1-2 is Jan to Feb 2001. Easy, isn't it? If it says "2001/winter late", one should interpret this as late winter in the year 2001. Logic, isn't it? This is for sorting purposes. Despite of this: The DATE_OF_COMPOSITION field has a weak point: Many dates are in a form like 1880/summer or 1880/autumn or 1880/spring or 1880/winter. When sorted, the order is autumn, spring, summer, winter. This does not reflect the conditions of earth the Lord gave us. When question marks are added, sorting is difficult too. The remedy is to sort the Brown numbers. These numbers are exactly in the order of composition dates: Br. 1 has been composed before Br. 2 and so on (but there are some works without Brown numbers). 3. Names of places are in the original form of their language. This means: Vienna is not Vienna but WIEN. Rome is neither Rome nor Rom but ROMA. Warsaw is neither Warsaw nor Warschau but WARSZAWA. Munich is neither Munich nor Monaco but MUENCHEN. ...and so on... Names of states are abbreviated according to the international standard for cars: e.g.: Australia: AUS Germany: D Switzerland: CH United States of America: USA ...and so on... So it reads: D-Muenchen, USA-Charleston, AUS-Broken Hill. 4. Typos found in sources are corrected. If they're not corrected for some reason, they're marked by "[sic]" added behind them. For the bibliographical info see 7. 5. Quotation marks: Double quotation marks ("blablabla") are for cited publications ABOUT Chopin, his works, manuscripts and so on. Single quotation marks ('blablabla') are for cited titles of compositions, may they be Chopin's or other composers'. 4. FIRST PUBLICATION field: If the title has been published simultaneously (or at least in the same year) by two different publishers A and B and I wasn't able to find out who was earlier, both are listed in the form: publisher A - publisher B. This means "space hyphen space". Attention, "Probst-Kistner" is *one name*. In the case that the first publication was made by two publishers *together*, I listed them in the form: publisher A/publisher B. In general, I listed the first known publication, even if the title has been republished in some larger collection and that larger collection is more known than the original publication: e. g. the Songs op. 74 were at first published in single parts, later comprehensively collected as Songs op. 74. 5. The REMARK[S] field contains data like: - different versions of the same title - additional publication data if different versions exist (if this is too much there may be a reference to some book where more info is available) - additional numbers if a title is a prior or later version of another title, which has another number - a note if title or date or names are doubtful - any other things which are obscure, doubtful, questionable, strange, funny in so far as they are of any interest. 6. The MANUSCRIPTS field lists: - where manuscripts of a title currently are so that one can find them when it's necessary to use them - a note if manuscripts are lost or destroyed - if known, what or who destroyed them - often WW II :-(... including where they have been or were last seen (if known) 7. I didn't have the time yet to verify (or falsify) the various bibliographical references. I've taken them from Brown and Kobylanska in the form they have them. I hope they were careful when doing them, but as Classical Philologist with experience in manuscripts, editing, papyrology etc. I know that typos are a must for all indexes. Perhaps I won't do it at all, at least for the moment, and focus on making new databases instead of more and more refining existing ones. 8. The following fields are complete and finished: Brown number, Opus number, English title, German title (I've inclu- ded this for the song titles), Original title (for the song titles), Date of composition, Key, instruments. The following fields are under construction: Kobylanska number, PWM number, Date of first edition, First edition (lists the editors), Dedicated to, place of composition, manuscripts. The remarks field is also not yet complete, but there can be put almost unlimited info, and it's free-form, see 5 above. However, I think what I have now is enough for the moment. I know it is not enough for musicians. 9. I appreciate any echo on these files and will try to make things better. Please comments, reports, wishes etc. to: Roman Mueller v18@vm.hd-net.uni-heidelberg.de or v18@ix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de. Due to the fact that I'm out of town regularly (in fact I'm nearly living on the highway, siiigh), there may be a delay in answering email. There are also technical reasons due to my two email addresses. I hereby have told you and needn't apologize in the future. 9. Reference works: Brown, Maurice J.: Chopin : an index of his works in chronological order / by Maurice J. E. Brown. - London ; New York : Macmillan, 1960. - XIII, 199 p. The PWM and Kobylanska will be added soon. Besides this, I still have to look into more recent publications to bring more light into the many works that are lost, forgotten, reported to exist, but never seen... DESTINATION CONTROL NOTICE: Disposition of the files to the following countries is FORBIDDEN: Iraq, Libya, Montenegro, North Korea, Serbia, Cuba. It is also forbidden to introduce viruses and errors into the database. Last but not least it is explicitely appreciated not only to play with the database in computers, but to play the music pieces on your instruments!!