Alarm Clock Mail of June 20, 2026 | International mail

It’s a “major discovery†for Mozartians – experts or simple music lovers – and for musicology in general, is enthusiastic Classic FM. A music notebook, kept at the National Library of France (BnF), “has been officially identified†as being by the hand of Mozart.

“Composed of 44 pages, this notebook was kept by the young composer between May and July 1778â€during his second stay in Paris, where he worked as “music teacher to Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînesâ€the daughter of the Duke of Guines, “a highly esteemed flutist in eighteenth-century Parisâ€specifies the British media.

“The notebook contains daily exercises that Mozart wrote for his harpist student, as well as seven pieces for flute and harp, probably intended to be played as a duet by father and daughter…adds radio specializing in classical music. The Duke of Guines had already commissioned a concerto for flute and harp from Mozart – which became one of the composer’s most famous works.

A musical rarity

These parts constitute a A musical rarityobserve The Country. Because if we are to believe his correspondence, the Austrian genius had little taste for the flute and the harp, and composed very little for these two instruments. Their discovery is all the more exceptional.

The scores resurfaced on February 2 when François-Pierre Goy, curator at the BnF in charge of collections before 1800, “discovered a small notebook of 44 pages among around twenty manuscripts being reclassified with a view to their transfer to the reservesâ€tells the Spanish daily.

The musicologist, who had just gone through the composer’s manuscripts, then believed he recognized “l’écriture de Mozartâ€notably “the floor keys rounded, leaning forward†or “the final double bars with flourishes above and below†.

Consulted, his colleagues at the BnF support the hypothesis, but it is Armin Brinzing, director of the Bibliotheca Mozartiana of the Mozarteum in Salzburg – the institution which preserves the largest collection in the world of Mozart’s autograph manuscripts – who definitively authenticates the manuscript, at the end of April.

Sheet music confiscated during the Revolution

The discovery of this notebook, which was part of two batches of scores confiscated from the home of the Duke of Guines in 1794, during the Terror, is “one of the most important in recent decades…insists Gilles Pécout, president of the BnF, cited by the British specialist site Slipped Disc.

“Because it allows us to document Mozart’s last stay in Paris and because it reveals to us in his daily life what the activity of the young professor Mozart is, in dialogue with his student…he explains.

The BnF currently has the second largest collection of Mozart manuscripts in the world, after that of the Mozarteum. It houses, among other gems, the priceless autograph score of Don Giovannibequeathed to the institution in the 19th century by the singer Pauline Viardot.

The seven rediscovered pieces will be given a world premiere during a concert at the BnF, Sunday June 21, as part of the Music Festival. The concert will be broadcast the next day on the antenna of France Music.