Mozart's Handwritten Notebook Found.

Francois-Pierre Goy, a curator in the music department of France's National Library in Paris, was working through a pile of anonymous 18th-century manuscripts he wanted to clear before his retirement when he noticed a handwriting style that stopped him cold. What he was holding turned out to be a 44-page notebook belonging to a 22-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, written between May and July of 1778 while Mozart was living in Paris and earning money as a music tutor, and it had been sitting uncatalogued in the library's archives for more than two centuries. Goy said he never imagined what he was about to find. The notebook was authenticated in April 2026 by Armin Brinzing, director of the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the world's leading authority on Mozart scholarship, who verified the handwriting, the French paper, and the identical stamps found on a separate Mozart manuscript already in the library's collection. The director of the BnF's music department called discoveries like this for a composer of Mozart's fame almost unheard of.

The notebook contains two distinct types of content that together offer an intimate window into Mozart's daily life as a young professional musician. The first is a series of daily exercises he composed for his student, a talented harpist named Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnieres de Guines, the daughter of the Duke of Guines, an aristocratic amateur flutist who was close to Marie Antoinette and who commissioned Mozart's celebrated Concerto for Flute and Harp during this same period. The second is seven short compositions for flute and harp, which researchers believe Mozart may have written for father and daughter to play together during lessons. The relationship between Mozart and the Duke eventually soured because the Duke failed to pay his bill, a detail that feels very human across the centuries. The notebook's survival is almost as remarkable as its contents: it was seized from the Duke's home during the French Revolution in 1794 as part of a general confiscation of aristocratic property, and arrived at the National Library in two bundles of music that nobody connected to Mozart until Goy began his pre-retirement sweep. The seven pieces were performed publicly for the first time at the National Library on June 22nd.

Source:https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/handwritten-notebook-discovered-major-paris/