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"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."
Tom Lehrer.
Mozart lived for 35 years
Lehrer did 97
> Lehrer did [sic] 97
FYI, most people speak the vast majority of their quotes before the day they die.
It is possible Lehrer said that before his last day on earth. Sometime around age 37 would make sense.
If you like a discovered manuscript story, you should see "In the Hands of Dante", great movie.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333644/
This review doesn't spoil the movie https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/19/in-the-hand-of-...
Side note, imdb's per country rating histograms are mesmerizing https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333644/ratings/ how different the Iranian ratings are vs the UK.
That looks pretty engaging - all the right people hate it.
I do jump directly to the 1-star reviews, so there is that.
First step for a great features: movies hated by people you despise
There is not a single citation in this article, even though it uses quotations.
Here is a more reputable article for this news story: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/arts/music/mozart-music-f...
At least they didn't use quotation marks for "emphasis".
Hear perhaps here:
Perhaps?
Turns out "technical debt" also applies to national archives.
More than you can possibly imagine. There are warehouses full of unread papers. Any one of which could contain a reference to somebody or something important.
There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way through fragile paper and messy handwriting.
I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?
I found a copy of the oldest film ever shot in China in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) library in London. The camera had been personally loaned to the French administrator in question by the Lumiere Brothers. The film had been entered in to the catalogue but nobody had looked at it in decades and they didn't have equipment to do so. The university wound up digitizing it with funds donated by the alumni and I was invited on my return from the US to address the alumni association on my research.
> the Duke failed to pay Mozart for his work
You stiffed Mozart!? A curse on your ghost!
Worse could happen.
The Duke could have thrown him in the castle jail.
Apparently this was an exercise book he made for a parisian tutee, who later fled the french revolution, leading to the confiscation of the notebook by the revolutionaries.
That's exactly what the article says... so yes apparently that's what it is
I have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook.
The podcast is in French, but you can hear the first public performance of the works here:
> Discovery of an unpublished manuscript by Mozart at the BnF: behind the scenes of an extraordinary operation
https://www.radiofrance.fr/francemusique/podcasts/l-invite-e...
I hope we get to hear his new/old music. That would be amazing
Perhaps here:
french radio "France Musique" aired it the other day, i don't know if its available outside of france though
It was also played live for Fête de la musique in Paris last Sunday.
The library where the discovery was made:
https://www.bnf.fr/en/actualitesEN/discovery-unpublished-aut...
I’m hoping that a full scan appears in the archive linked at the bottom of the page. I’m a composer and still hand-notate in a notebook. It’s so cool to the penmanship of someone writing in notebooks so quickly yet cleanly. In case you didn’t read, the contents are primarily exercises in composition where Mozart began a passage, the student continued, and Mozart corrected / guided the students work where needed. So there’s a higher percentage of Mozart in the pieces here than not. Like Brundlefly.
While interesting. Is it a 'Major discovery' ?
They aren’t making more Mozart notebooks so probably.
Mozart is among the most famous Western composers, and, like others of his stature, all his extant manuscripts have been cataloged and studied extensively. To find a previously unknown manuscript is a major event in that scholarship.
Why wouldn’t it be? Heck, how could it not be?
I love his handwriting style. I wonder if it was the first draft or a copy [1]
Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.
Schools used to spend a lot of time on penmanship. I visited a high school where they had a wall of notes left by each senior class. In the notes from the 1950s the writing was quite refined and looked very practiced, and notes left by kids in the 2020s looked like 2nd grade printing by comparison. I don't think cursive handwriting is really even taught/required anymore.
I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Mozart that writing was a big point of emphasis in schools.
You've named one composer who is. I don't see where the inductive step applies.
Beethoven certainly wasn't.
Let's hope it is more authentic than the Hitler Diaries[1]
Any time something of popular historical interest like this pops up I think about that.
If you've not read it then Robert Harris's (factual) book about the affair is entertaining, not least because such a broad sweep of dislikeable characters were undone by greed and folly!
Confiscated during the revolution, kept by the national library. That's a bit different to "forged on schoolbooks with a Bic pen" provenance-wise.
Even inside the tiny niche of the classical music history world, a book of daily exercises - written for some now-obscure student, and owned by a national library - is actually a pretty minor thing.
Very few counterfeiters bother doing nickles and dimes.
> By coincidence, Goy had been looking at other documents Mozart had written for teaching just weeks earlier
Color me sceptical
Anyone remember the Hitler diaries?
seems like more of a minor discovery to me
Seven previously unknown compositions for flute and harp is not minor
don't fret over dark keys