Köchel catalogue son's earlier works; Mozart's catalogue of his own compositions (begun in February 1784 with K. 449) allows relatively precise dating of many of his later works. The catalogue included the opening bars of each piece, known as an incipit. Köchel divided the corpus into a main chronology of 626 works, and five appendices ("" in German, abbreviated to "Anh.") The appendices (Anh. I-V) included: Since Köchel published his original catalogue in 1863 (now referred to as K), the dating of Mozart's compositions has been subject to constant revision. Many more pieces have since been found, re-dated, re-attributed and re-numbered, requiring
Köchel catalogue three revised editions of the catalogue. Subsequent editions – especially the third edition (K) by Alfred Einstein (1937), and the sixth edition (K) by Franz Giegling, , and Alexander Weinmann (1964) – have reflected attempts to arrange the growing list of works in a more accurate chronological order, according to various levels of scholarship. A major shortcoming of K was that there was no room to expand the strictly sequential numbering in the main catalogue to allow for any new discoveries or further reassessment of existing works. For the 1937 edition (K) Einstein (following the analyses of Théodore de Wyzewa