As a
composer, I think the best way to do this is to include the composer's name in the title of the node. If we do away with the idea of adding publisher's catalog numbers to the node titles, it would make it so that if a young music
student came here looking for
Mozart's
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K 550, in the search reults he would get Mozart: Symphony No. 40.
Thinking forward, I think it would be wise to include the standardized "No." before the pieces actual
chronological assignment, as this is so commonly used.
Including the composer's name in the title will make the actual nodes far less confusing and more efficient, I think. If I were to search for Symphony No. 5 and got a node featuring every fifth
symphony by every major composer in history when I was really looking for, say,
David Maslanka's, it would be very bewildering and perhaps even overwhelming.
Also, there are many kinds of pieces that most major composers wrote that don't have convenient number titles, like a
Mass. Most major composers in the first three classified periods of music wrote at least one, and the returned search results for this would again be
gargantuan.
In conclusion, I believe the best system would be a slight permutation of Gamaliel's suggestion:
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9
A further suggestion would be to ask if everything's code can be altered to interpret "#" as "No. " within a search string as the pound sign is sometimes used in place of "No. ", although far less frequently.