I can only speak for myself, but this makes it really hard to keep track of the songs I like. I love listening to classical music but if you asked me my favorite artists I would have difficulty telling you specifics.
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Earlier, this was just a tradition, but around 1800 or so an idea was growing that music should speak for itself without the need for words or descriptions. This term was “absolute music” and it was thought that using words — even in a title — was a crutch that would hamper music’s power to speak to ideas and emotions that we cannot express with words. So a lot of music, self-consciously, was just referred to by its genre.
Composers these days title their music so buyers easily know what piece to look for when they are buying something. Composers back then generally didn’t market their music to the public and didn’t need “name recognition” of their pieces because mostly they were working under a rich person’s patronage to earn their living.
I’m not sure about all the others, but if you go through the BWV (Bach’s catalog), you’ll find that a great many of the numbered pieces do have names too!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis
For scholars that have to deal with thousands upon thousands of pieces, numbers are mostly just an easier way to organize things.
Though I also get what you’re asking isn’t necessarily about cataloguing….many times composers do simply name a piece something like “Sonata #1”.
There’s many reasons to do this, but composers will often do “studies” in themes, melodies, harmonies, etc.
Think about it like this: Van Gogh has a ton of different paintings that are just called “Sunflowers” and there’s a smorgasbord of paintings that are just called “Woman on Chair” or “Bowl of Grapes with a Wine Bottle”
I’m probably not doing a good job of making myself clear, but I hope this helps!
Names like “Für Elise” or “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” are very likely to be butchered by foreigners trying to use them, while technical descriptions can easily be translated, recognised, and used in more situations.
The technical names of Fur Elise and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik are “bagatelle” and “serenade” respectively (although the former doesn’t really have a name as it was not published in Beethoven’s lifetime- ‘fur Elise’ was simply the dedication he wrote on the manuscript). And Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was not meant to be an evocative title, it simply means “a little serenade” and I believe is how Mozart privately noted the piece in his personal catalogue.
To your larger point, for most of the Baroque and Classical periods, music was largely seen as an “abstract” art, so the names and forms reflected this view. In the nineteenth century and later, music came to be seen by many composers as “programmatic” (more directly representative of nature, emotions, actions etc) and descriptive titles became more fashionable for some types of pieces (e.g symphonic poems of Liszt, many piano works by Schumann etc).
There are a lot of good answers already in this thread. I’ll add one other factor.
A great deal of classical* music was written for functional purposes rather than to call attention to itself as a composition in its own right. If your main job is as the kapellmeister of a cathedral, you might bang out fifty pieces a year to give your choir and organist something to work with. We only notice if you’re JS Bach, because he was good enough at doing it that you’d want to listen to it a second time. If you’ve ever heard random background music in a commercial that was strangely compelling—and here I mean pure background stuff, not pop songs licensed as a jingle—that’s Bach born at the wrong time.
Ditto a lot of chamber music. The Prince-Archbishop of Wherever is too posh to re-use a waltz for his next soirée, so he has his pet composer make a new one. Is it great? Eh, doesn’t matter, it gets the job done. The analogy here is house music today. A lot of it is brand new in any given week, or recycled from bits of other stuff (also a good analogy), but nobody’s expecting Skrillex-quality** stuff from some rando in Tulsa.
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* my inner musicology professor is screaming at me for using this term, since the Classical period was only a small part of what we normally mean by the artsy-fartsy stuff that runs from Bach to Bartok.
** yeah I said it
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Classical music was created in a time when the marketing of recorded music was not a consideration, because recorded music did not exist.
Many classical pieces that today are referenced by name, had those names “attached” much later from their creation. In many cases, the name came from reviewers writing much later. Mahler’s “Titan” (1st symphony) and “Resurrection” (2nd symphony) are examples.
For those of us who are really into specific niches of music, the “opus” number are more than sufficient. I’m a nerd for Bach’s organ works, which are catalogued under BWV – *Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis -* an index first published in 1950, revised in 1990. Bach aficionados know that his well known “Halloween” toccata and fugue is BWV 565; one of my favorites is BWV 564, the tocatta, adagio, and fugue in C major, whose conclusion features one of the most pleasing glissandos in all of organ music.
Tocatta and fugue in D minor is a completely valid name. Just ask my son, Second Born Offspring with Brown Hair.
I’ll add to this – part of the switch from “absolute music” (sonata) to “program music” (weird titles) was that a rising middle class became the new market for music in the 19th century – like all entertainment, publishers wanted to see music to them as enticing titles, not just “sonata”. A lot
Of program music was the result of these publishers wanting to sell music to these amateur middle class musicians with upright pianos in their living room
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