Just briefly I wish that publishers would (a sort of lament ...)

[eschiss1]

an obscure-music-fan/classifying-habit-something lament... (and another shameless attempt, like an earlier thread, to bend ears for knowledge I don't have... see below... for which all thanks and all appreciation.)

actually provide some information - like the full names of the composer. And the date of publication- sometimes even of composition, if it weren't asking too much. etc. etc.

Too many cases in point. Like- to provide some minor ones (there are some very important and obvious ones in music history of course that aren't these!)...
"Joseph Raff" in earlier thread. Or solo voice/piano songs (also scanned in at LoC, some of these) that were published (by Schirmer, others) as by "James H. Rogers" when both James Hotchkiss Rogers (more focused on organ, a Guilmant pupil), and James Henderson Rogers (more focused on brass band, I think) were alive and (... for all I know?) might have written them.  I thought it was pretty definite that the Guilmant pupil wrote them but now after reading the LoC staffer's response to my email I'm more neutral and interested.

Then there's the several works online I noticed by Heinrich Neal, whose dates are given in Wikipedia as 1870-1940, born in Germany. That's fine, except that the earliest of the works are published in the US in 1882. Different (though maybe related) Neal (his family was German-American, so related is a could-be here...); or prodigy (age 12 - not... unknown); or misdated (unlikely- that looks to me like a copyright marker- these are at memory.loc.gov, I've reuploaded one to IMSLP... , not a guess. Misreading it maybe, it's not the highest-resolution scan...) One later work, a string quartet no.1 op.54 in Eflat, I can believe is by Heinrich Neal 1870-1940 actually (digitized by Google and findable at books.google.com where it can be downloaded as a PDF- probably not in the EU.)

There was a paper - more Classical-era-oriented than Romantic, though the problem at its most general is of course known as epistemology and transcends not only era but particular subject ! - a couple of decades back, in several parts, about problems of identification in late Classical symphonies. (Not - trivial ; start with the fact that people published their work as Haydn - or their publishers did it for them - pirate publishers may have brought out works by Haydn under different names also to increase the brand recognition of those names, if a weak memory is serving at all.  That seems to be the least of the problem. Plus as usual composers with similar names so far as the names were identified (hrm, did composers keep receipts of their one-time fees or their royalties? ... royalties, right, should be so lucky) (fortunate for the composers who kept worklists of their own music though, like Raff, Spohr and Mozart, who make later generations' work so much easier...)

Anyways. Thanks in advance for anyone who knows anything about Neal or Rogers, and I will be sparing (but not that sparing) of further questions...

Someone turned up another document confirming, by the way, and adding more detail (a confirming document, and the date of his move to Binghamton after Owego) to the conclusions about Joseph Kaspar Raff - see http://imslp.org/wiki/Category_talk:Raff,_Joachim. (my embarrassing mistake at the end'of included.)
Eric

[Hovite]

There was a paper - more Classical-era-oriented than Romantic, though the problem at its most general is of course known as epistemology and transcends not only era but particular subject ! - a couple of decades back, in several parts, about problems of identification in late Classical symphonies. (Not - trivial ; start with the fact that people published their work as Haydn - or their publishers did it for them - pirate publishers may have brought out works by Haydn under different names also to increase the brand recognition of those names, if a weak memory is serving at all.  That seems to be the least of the problem. Plus as usual composers with similar names so far as the names were identified (hrm, did composers keep receipts of their one-time fees or their royalties? ... royalties, right, should be so lucky) (fortunate for the composers who kept worklists of their own music though, like Raff, Spohr and Mozart, who make later generations' work so much easier...)

The idea of artistic ownership does not appear to have existed in quite the same way in the baroque and classical periods.

Bach happily recycled earlier works by himself and others, such as A & B Marcello, Torelli, and Vivaldi.

And Kraus stole a march (VB 154) on Mozart when he borrowed from Idomeneo: http://www.naxosdirect.co.uk/KRAUS-Symphonies-Vol--4/title/8555305/

Not that Mozart would have minded: his own Symphony No. 37 was based on Michael Haydn's Symphony No. 25.

[JimL]

...Not that Mozart would have minded: his own Symphony No. 37 was based on Michael Haydn's Symphony No. 25.

Based on?  All Mozart did was add a slow introduction.  The rest of the symphony is all Michael Haydn.  And it's his 26th, not 25th Symphony.

[Josh]

This stuff does get really confusing.  One of the worst offenders is the Franz Schubert (1808-1878) known for only one work, L´Abeille, a nice little piece for violin and piano.  I mean, the second result when I searched on Google was a false attribution involving this composer:

http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/The-Bee/670704

They attribute it to the more famous Franz Schubert (1797-1828).  Actually, paging through search results, it seems at least a third of the results attribute this piece to the wrong Schubert.  It's a real nightmare for someone like me, as I'm uncontrollably mentally obsessive about facts being right.  I literally lose sleep thinking about something as insignificant as this; I simply can't stand the thought of someone believing something that's factually untrue.  Man... why did somebody have to start a topic like this?

Let's not forget Brahms' Variations on a Theme of Haydn (Joseph, Michael??).  Only it wasn't by either one, but by Pleyel.  Oh wait, it may not have been even by Pleyel, as nobody can find the originating work in Pleyel's collection of works.  The whole origin of this confusion apparently comes from one person, Carl Ferdinand Pohl, who showed Brahms this theme and either invented or falsely learned about a made-up piece and attributed it to Joseph Haydn.  Geez, maybe that librarian Pohl actually wrote it himself, but was afraid Brahms wouldn't take it seriously since it sounded so outdated, unless he claimed it to be by a much-earlier composer.  PS: not to be confused with Richard Pohl, an actual composer. Who was opposed to Brahms.  Hey, maybe they were cousins, and the theme is actually by Richard Pohl, thinking to pull a big one over on Brahms and his little club of "classical" groupies by having a joke at his expense, his cousin Carl waiting a few years to show it to Brahms...

Wait, am I drunk or something without realising it?!  What the hell did I just type?  I'm done.

EDIT: Wait, no I'm not.  Just to add to the mess, the Michael Haydn symphony may be numbered 25, but it probably wasn't his chronological 25th.  The order is screwed up partially due to some of them being falsely attributed to older brother Joseph, in some cases into the 20th century.  And as we know, the numbers stick; like, calling that slow intro W.A. Mozart's Symphony #37, when it was more like #49 or #50, somewhere in that range.  What an absolute nightmare.

[Alan Howe]

...Not that Mozart would have minded: his own Symphony No. 37 was based on Michael Haydn's Symphony No. 25.

Based on?  All Mozart did was add a slow introduction.  The rest of the symphony is all Michael Haydn.  And it's his 26th, not 25th Symphony.

M. Haydn's No.26? Are you sure, Jim? Wikipedia seems to disagree!

[JimL]

And we must defer to Wikipedia in all things, of course!    I just checked, and apparently the symphonies were renumbered or something, because I had read that it was the 26th, but now the symphony in G is #25 and #26 is in E-flat.  So I stand corrected.

[Alan Howe]

Wikipedia was far from the only source, Jim - just the nearest to hand...
As for renumbering, hmmmmmmm.......

[JimL]

Frankly, it was so long ago that I can't even remember where I read it.  Probably before there was an internet, much less Wikipedia.  Nusuth.  I definitely thought it was the 26th for at least a decade, so it's news to me that it was the 25th all along.  It very well may be that someone has done a more accurate catalogue of Michael Haydn's symphonies and shuffled them around slightly, considering that it wasn't all that long ago, as I recall, that they were being referred to as the "Symphony in G" by radio announcers, without any number being given at all.

[eschiss1]

There are several Michael Haydn symphony cataloguing systems- the Wikipedia articles do cover this, by the way, if not ideally and not in the best-linked manner; there's actually a Wikipedia article for each or practically all of Michael Haydn's symphonies, and a category http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Symphonies_by_Michael_Haydn - which see... along with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Compositions_by_Michael_Haydn and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Michael_Haydn - there's some explanatory material there that's not all in the main Michael Haydn article I think.

Eric