A frenzy of cataloguing gripped composers of the Romantic era, who painstakingly gave opus numbers to their works – at least those that made it out of their desk or drawer. After their death, there were even people who persistently (usually in a self-interested manner) catalogued the output often deliberately left unsigned. Thus Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s graceful Capriccio in E minor was combined in the posthumous opus 81 with three more of his works for string quartet. Today, it is often performed as a stand-alone composition.

Beethoven’s example shows that the order of opuses and numbers does not always reflect the chronology of composition. His ‘classical’ String Quartets, Op. 18 – dialoguing with the masterpieces of Mozart and Haydn – were published, in books of three, in a different order than they were composed. Satisfied (rightly so) with his work, the composer decided to place the somewhat sombre Quartet No. 4 at the beginning of the second book, although the numbering does not reflect the order in which the works were composed.

As for the 31-year-old Juliusz Zarębski, he was concerned not about how his Piano Quintet in G minor would be published, but whether anyone would want to publish it at all. Wonderfully received by the critics, dedicated to Franz Liszt, this masterpiece of nineteenth-century Polish chamber music was written in 1885 – just a few months before the young piano virtuoso’s death. The concern did not prove unfounded: the Quintet did not appear in print until the inter-war period.