Cool Finds

Why Did the Handwriting in This 248-Year-Old Notebook Look Familiar? It Turned Out to Be a Forgotten Mozart Manuscript

While working as a tutor in 1778, the composer created seven short pieces for flute and harp with his student’s help. This month, audiences heard the works performed for the very first time

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

June 25, 2026 1:17 p.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

As he leafed through the notebook, François-Pierre Goy couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen something like it before.

The 44-page volume contained seven handwritten pieces of music for flute and harp. Judging by the penmanship, they appeared to be the work of two composers. One of them had scribbled out musical notation in a familiar manner.

Goy, a curator at the National Library of France, found the pages in a stack of some 20 anonymous manuscripts in February. Just weeks before, he’d been studying the manuscripts of another composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

“I recognized Mozart’s handwriting, his way of drawing braces, the rounded treble clefs leaning forward, the double final bars with fermatas above and below,” Goy tells Le Monde’s Marie-Aude Roux.

The curator contacted Laurence Decobert, a musicologist at the library who’d curated a 2017 exhibition on the Austrian composer. She agreed that the writing in the notebook looked an awful lot like Mozart’s known manuscripts.

The find eventually made its way to Armin Brinzing, director of the Mozart Library at the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, which is home to hundreds of the musician’s letters and compositions. In April, Brinzing traveled to Paris to see the manuscript for himself.

“It is very clear that it is Mozart’s handwriting,” he tells the New York Times’ Jeffrey Arlo Brown. “This is the most important Mozart discovery in decades.”

Experts now think the notebook contains a series of composition lessons from 1778, when Mozart was tutoring Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes. She was a talented harpist, but her father, the Duke of Guînes, believed she had great potential as a composer. He was a flutist himself, and he wanted her to write music that they could play together. The pieces in the notebook are collaborations that Mozart and de Guînes composed during their lessons.

Earlier this month, harpist Nicolas Tulliez and flutist Mathilde Caldérini, both members of Radio France’s Philharmonic Orchestra, received a copy of the compositions. They arranged clandestine meetings at the broadcaster’s Paris headquarters to practice the works.

The National Library of France announced the discovery on June 19. The nearly 250-year-old compositions debuted to the public three days later, when Tulliez and Caldérini’s performance was broadcast on Radio France.

For those familiar with the most obscure pieces from Mozart’s catalog, the discovery provides a rare opportunity to hear a new work for the very first time. It also sheds light on the composer’s teaching methods, allowing scholars and musicians to follow along “basically bar by bar,” Brinzing tells the Times. “What did she write? What did Mozart correct?”

Mozart moved from Salzburg to Paris in March 1778, hoping to build his career as a composer. The Duke of Guînes, a favorite of Marie Antoinette, hired the 22-year-old to tutor his daughter for two hours each day. Mozart admired de Guînes’ talent as a harpist, but he had little faith that composition was in her future. “She has no ideas, and none seem likely to come,” he wrote to his father in May, just after the pair’s fourth lesson. “I have tried her in every possible way.”

First, Mozart wrote out a “very simple minuet” and asked de Guînes to create a variation on it. When that didn’t work, he reasoned that his student had “not a notion how or what to do first,” as he explained to his father. “So I began to vary the first bar and told her to continue in the same manner.” That exercise went “tolerably well,” but once it was finished, Mozart wrote, “I told her she must try to originate something herself—only the treble of a melody. So she thought it over for a whole quarter of an hour, and nothing came.”

When Mozart’s father replied, he was equally pessimistic of the young woman’s potential, asking, “Do you think everyone has your genius?” By July, the situation had only worsened. “She will never be a composer,” Mozart complained. “All labor is vain with her, for she is not only vastly stupid, but also vastly lazy.” Later that month, he learned that de Guînes had gotten engaged and wouldn’t be continuing her lessons.

Was Mozart, who’d composed his earliest works at age 5, asking too much of his student? “He was very demanding, because he was so talented and so young,” Caldérini tells the Times. “Maybe he couldn’t understand that it was not so easy for someone else to compose.”

Nobody knows whether the Duke of Guînes and his daughter ever played the compositions. According to the library, the notebook was stashed among other musical documents that were confiscated from the duke’s home during the Reign of Terror in the mid-1790s, an especially violent period during the French Revolution.

The discovery is particularly exciting for harpists and flutists, who have “very little repertoire” connected to Mozart, Mathias Auclair, director of the National Library of France’s music department, tells Agence France-Presse. The composer wrote more than 600 works, but only a small handful of them are for the harp or the flute—which Mozart once called “an instrument that I cannot stand.”

Ellen Wexler | | Read More

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.