A previously unknown manuscript in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's own handwriting has been discovered at France's National Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BnF) in Paris, in what the institution is calling one of the most significant Mozart finds in decades. The 44-page notebook, dating from 1778, contains seven short pieces for flute and harp as well as a dozen daily composition exercises — teaching material Mozart prepared for an aristocratic French student when he was 22 years old. The music will receive its first public performance on Sunday at the BnF as part of France's annual Fête de la Musique, performed by Mathilde Calderini and Nicolas Tulliez of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.
The discovery was made on 2 February by François-Pierre Goy, a curator in the library's music department who was working through a bundle of anonymous, untitled manuscripts before his retirement. Familiar with Mozart's handwriting, he noticed telltale signs: rounded treble clefs tilted slightly forward, and bass clefs drawn in the opposite direction from the French convention. Comparisons with known Mozart manuscripts, the French paper used, and matching stamps on a related score all pointed to the same conclusion. A colleague and Mozart specialist confirmed the hypothesis, and in April Armin Brinzing, director of the Bibliotheca Mozartiana at the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg — the institution that holds the world's largest collection of Mozart autograph manuscripts — formally authenticated the document.
The notebook relates to a well-documented but little-understood episode in Mozart's life. Between May and July 1778, during a longer stay in Paris, he gave lessons to Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes, an accomplished harpist and daughter of the Duke of Guînes, an aristocrat close to Queen Marie Antoinette and a noted flautist himself. Mozart had already completed his celebrated Concerto for Flute and Harp in C major for the Duke earlier that year — a work still frequently performed today — though he is known to have complained that he was never properly paid for it. A surviving letter from Mozart to the Duke also reveals his frustration at his daughter's lack of compositional inspiration, even as he praised her instrumental talent. The lessons ended when she married. The manuscript is believed to have entered the BnF's collections after revolutionary authorities confiscated property from the Guînes family home in 1794, when the family emigrated to England during the Terror.
The find carries particular weight for several reasons. Discoveries of unknown works by such a celebrated composer are, experts say, almost unheard of. For flautists and harpists, who have relatively little dedicated repertoire to draw on, the addition of seven new Mozart pieces is especially welcome. The manuscript also offers rare insight into Mozart as a teacher and illuminates his final Parisian sojourn, a period about which historical records are sparse. BnF president Gilles Pécout described the find as "without doubt one of the most important of recent decades", while music department director Mathias Auclair noted that it reveals, in intimate detail, how Mozart approached the teaching of composition.