Newly Discovered Notebook Written By 22-Year-Old Mozart Contains New Music And Shows How He Taught A Young Harpist

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.

A Mozart Manuscript Hiding in Plain Sight

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.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Goy said.

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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“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 told Le Monde.

The case strengthened from there. Laurence Decobert, a musicologist at the library who had curated a 2017 Mozart exhibition, agreed that the writing resembled Mozart’s hand. In April, Brinzing traveled to Paris to inspect the manuscript in person.

“It is very clear,” Brinzing told The New York Times, “that it is Mozart’s handwriting.”

The notebook’s path through history only makes the discovery even more interesting. According to the National Library of France, the manuscript came from two bundles of music confiscated from the Duke of Guînes in 1794 during the French Revolution. The duke, a close associate of Marie Antoinette, had fled to England.

Mozart the Teacher

In 1778, the 22-year-old composer had moved to Paris to build his career. The Duke of Guînes, a respected flutist, hired him to teach his daughter composition for two hours a day. She played harp well, and her father hoped she could learn to write pieces that the two of them might perform together.

But Mozart was not as optimistic.

“She has no ideas, and none seem likely to come,” Mozart wrote to his father in May 1778, according to Smithsonian Magazine. “I have tried her in every possible way.”

The newly surfaced notebook now shows what those not-so-great lessons looked like. Mozart gave the young Guînes simple models, asked her to vary melodies and corrected her work as she went. In one account from his letters, he described pretending to struggle with a minuet so that she would continue it: “Look what an ass I am,” he told her. “I started a minuet, and I can’t even complete the first part — would you be kind enough to finish it?”

For scholars, the value lies exactly in this back-and-forth. This fantastic notebook preserves Mozart’s never-before-seen teaching methods, making it truly a unique manuscript.

“You can follow basically bar by bar,” Brinzing told The New York Times. “What did she write? What did Mozart correct?”

But while Mozart was the preeminent composer of his age, he was perhaps not the best teacher. He judged his pupil quite harshly. “He was very demanding, because he was so talented and so young,” Caldérini said. “Maybe he couldn’t understand that it was not so easy for someone else to compose.”

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A Small but Precious Addition to the Canon

Mozart wrote more than 600 published musical works, but discoveries of unknown music remain rare. In 2024, researchers announced another long-lost Mozart piece in Leipzig, likely written when he was a teenager. Previously, a four-minute cantata was found among the mountains of archives in the Czech Museum of Music in November 2015. The Paris notebook adds something different: not only new music, but new evidence of how Mozart taught.

Mozart wrote very little for harp or flute, and harpists have long had only one major Mozart work to claim: the Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra in C major, K. 299, written for the same father-daughter pair.

Most of the newly found pieces are short and light. One remains incomplete. But one fast movement, lasting about five minutes, appears to contain a large amount of Mozart’s own writing.

Goy told The New York Times that “roughly three-quarters to 80 percent should be by Mozart.”