What is Classical Completionist?

Classical Completionist is a personal listening tracker built for people who want to explore classical music seriously — not just casually stumble across the well-known pieces, but actually work through what a composer wrote, notice what they've missed, and feel a sense of progress over time.

The idea is simple: every composer in the catalogue has a list of their works. You mark what you've heard, what you want to hear, and what you've been lucky enough to catch live. Over time, a picture builds up — which eras you gravitate towards, which corners of the repertoire you've barely touched, where the gaps are.

It's less about completionism in a rigid sense and more about giving yourself a map. Classical music has centuries of output and it can feel overwhelming without some structure. This is that structure — a quiet, personal record of a journey through music history.

One entry per work, not per collection

Many reference sources group things. "48 Preludes and Fugues" becomes a single entry. "Op.28 Preludes" is one line. That approach is tidy, but it hides everything interesting. Here, each individual piece gets its own row — so Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is 48 entries, Chopin's Op.28 is 24. It makes the lists longer, but it means you can actually track what you've heard at the level that matters for listening.

Original compositions only

Composers often arranged or orchestrated other people's music. Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is a magnificent piece of work — but it's catalogued under Mussorgsky, where it belongs, not duplicated under Ravel. The same logic applies throughout: arrangements and transcriptions of others' works are excluded from the arranger's catalogue, but juvenilia and early original works are always included. A 17-year-old Wagner's string quartet is still Wagner.

Major revisions get their own entry

Some composers — Stravinsky in particular — revised their works so substantially that the 1911 and 1947 versions of Petrushka are genuinely different pieces for different forces. Where a revision is significant enough to constitute a distinct performing edition, it has its own entry. Minor corrections and reprints do not.

Catalogue numbers: primary sources, secondary cross-references

Every composer has a preferred cataloguing system — Bach has BWV, Mozart has K, Schubert has D. We follow those conventions. For composers with competing systems (CPE Bach has both Wq and H numbers; Nielsen has Op., FS, and the newer CNW catalogue), the most established system is used as the primary reference, with the others stored as cross-references. Where IMSLP and musicological databases genuinely disagree — as they do for some Albéniz opus numbers, where publishers in different countries assigned the same number to different works — we note the ambiguity rather than pretend it isn't there.

Spurious and disputed works

Attribution in classical music is a live scholarly debate. Some works long ascribed to a composer turn out to be by students or contemporaries; some are genuinely uncertain. Rather than silently exclude these, they're included in the catalogue and flagged as disputed — so you can see them, but they're not counted in your progress totals.

What counts as "the catalogue"

The primary reference source is IMSLP, cross-checked against MusicBrainz and specialist composer catalogues where they exist. The goal is to reflect what a serious listener would recognise as the canonical output of each composer — complete, but not inflated with noise.