Newly Discovered Notebook Written By 22-Year-Old Mozart Contains New Music And Shows How He Taught A Young Harpist
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Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Flipboard Bluesky Email Copy Link Home → Science → News A newly authenticated notebook from 22-year-old Mozart reveals unheard music and a rare glimpse of his lessons in Paris.
In a pile of anonymous manuscripts in Paris, a curator nearing retirement found something scholars spend lifetimes hoping to see: Mozart thinking on paper. The 44-page notebook, now authenticated by experts, contains lessons Mozart gave in 1778 to Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes, a young aristocrat and talented harpist. Inside are exercises, corrections and seven previously unknown pieces for flute and harp — music that reveals not just Mozart the composer, but Mozart the teacher.
In this role, he was rather impatient, but also inventive with his lessons and intensely hands-on. The National Library of France announced the discovery on June 19. The new Mozart compositions received their first public performance days later, played by flutist Mathilde Caldérini and harpist Nicolas Tulliez of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.
“This is the most important Mozart discovery in decades,” Armin Brinzing, director of the Mozart Library at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, told The New York Times. François-Pierre Goy, a conservator in the music department of the National Library of France, found the notebook in February while sorting through about 20 anonymous manuscripts. The pages looked like teaching material for music students, with harmony exercises, short pieces, and homework corrections.
Then Goy was stunned when he recognized the handwriting. He had recently studied Mozart’s teaching manuscripts and began noticing telltale habits: the way the composer drew braces, rounded treble clefs and final bars. He painstakingly compared the notebook with known Mozart manuscripts, including a copy of the Concerto for Flute and Harp, which Mozart wrote in the same Paris period for the Duke of Guînes and his daughter.
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