“The Latin word for work became music's highest honor — opus numbers catalog a composer's output, and 'magnum opus' names the greatest work of a life. The humble word for labor carried ambition it could not have foreseen.”
Latin opus — work, a piece of work, a labor — is the most straightforward word in this company. It comes from a Proto-Indo-European root *op-, meaning to work, to achieve. The same root gave Sanskrit apas (work), Greek ompē (divine voice doing work), and the Latin compounds: opera (plural of opus, meaning works collectively, and the musical form), operari (to work), and eventually the English operate, operative, and operation.
The practice of numbering musical compositions with opus numbers — 'Opus 18,' 'Opus 131,' 'Opus posthumous' — was standardized in the late 17th and 18th centuries, as printed music became commercially important and publishers needed to catalog and distinguish works. Beethoven's publisher Nikolaus Simrock insisted on opus numbers for commercial organization. Bach, who published little in his lifetime, received no opus numbers; his works are catalogued by the BWV system devised after his death.
The numbering was often chaotic. Opus numbers were assigned by publishers, not composers, and often reflected publication order rather than composition order. Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony is Op. 7b in one publisher's catalog, left unfinished not from abandonment but from distraction. Brahms suppressed dozens of early works and started his official opus count late in life, making his Op. 1 not his earliest composition but the one he chose to present first.
Magnum opus — great work — is the phrase applied to the defining achievement of a creative life. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling is his magnum opus; Einstein's general relativity paper is his; Tolstoy's War and Peace is his. The phrase imposes a hierarchy that artists often resist: to assign one work as the greatest is to diminish the rest.
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Opus numbers are meant to organize but often misrepresent. They reflect when a work was published, not when it was composed or what mattered to the composer. Brahms burned 20 string quartets before presenting Op. 51 as his first. Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony bears an opus number assigned posthumously by publishers who had no idea what to do with the fragment they found.
The word for work carries a humility that its use denies. To call something a magnum opus is to declare it the great work, the summit. The Latin opus — just work, any work, a piece of labor — did not expect to carry the weight of superlatives. It was just doing its job.
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