Compositions vs. Collections

[goldberg988]

What exactly makes a work page classified as a COMPOSITION v. a COLLECTION. I am concerned about the organization of the songs (Lieder) in the Hugo Wolf category, and am considering trying to clean it up. Certain "works" of Wolf like the Morike-lieder, Italienisches Liederbuch, etc. I can see classified as "compositions" since the composer did compose them for the most part as a unit, even if they are 50-60 songs in the "composition" and rarely if never performed as a single unit. However some pages seem to be various songs that a publisher might have collected later on, and published as a "unit" even if they were not considered as such by the composer. For example, I have a collection of Wolf songs from his youth, published posthumously, and I think that each song should get it's own page as a separate composition? Or should it go as a composition "11 Songs" or a collection "11 Posthmous Youthful Songs" etc.

[Davydov]

The collections category was originally introduced to deal with editions that contained multiple works which couldn't easily be split into their individual contents. The works in question could either be by the same composer, or many different composers.

The definition of a 'work' has proved harder to pin down, but generally if Wolf wrote a set of songs at the same time intending them to be published or performed together, or if he authorised a group of unpublished songs written at different times to be printed together under a single title, then these would be considered 'works' for most purposes.

If the 11 songs you mentioned were published posthumously, and Wolf hadn't intended them to constitute a single work, then this would definitely be a 'collection'. You then have a choice of either:

• Creating a page for the collection, adding cross-references from the collections page to the individual work pages (if they already exist), and vice versa, or
• Splitting the edition into its individual parts, creating pages for the works if they don't already exist.

If you choose the first option, then bear in mind that work pages which only contain a cross-reference to the collection, and no other files at all, could be mistaken for a 'blank' page (which is frowned upon on IMSLP), and might be deleted.