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22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'
- wvbdmp 4mo agoApparently 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.
- yayoohooyahoo 4mo agoThat's exactly what the article says... so yes apparently that's what it is
- stinkbeetle 4mo agoI have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook.
- rob74 4mo agoNote-book, as in "book containing musical notes". I expected a regular notebook (for the other kind of notes, that people like you and me might write)...
- palmotea 4mo ago> I have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook. I'm suspicious. Didn't Mozart use a word processor? I mean, not a PC program, that would be ridiculous, but one of those dedicated stand-alone word processor systems (like Smith-Corona made) that they used in ancient times.
- CWuestefeld 4mo agoOne of my pet peeves is what seems to be an overwhelming desire in writers to always put an adjective in front of every noun. You can never just let it be a "notebook", it has to be some kind of notebook. It's even worse in product naming and advertising. Nothing can be just "vanilla", you have to even put an adjective in front of your adjectives, like "Mexican vanilla". EDIT: s/verb/noun/
- loloquwowndueo 4mo agoRich Corinthian leather! My dude!
- dylan604 4mo agoBut Mexican vanilla is different from Tahitian vanilla which is different from Madagascar. IYKYK and only ignorant people think all vanilla is the same. Saying "just vanilla" shows that ignorance just as someone that says "dirt cheap" has clearly never bought dirt.
- abstractspoon 4mo agoAnyone remember the Hitler diaries?
- mpfect 4mo agoTurns out "technical debt" also applies to national archives.
- jfengel 4mo agoMore 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.
- mmooss 4mo agoI 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?
- computerdork 4mo agoOh, wow, that is actually an interesting application of ai
- jfengel 4mo agoIf you could automate transcription, it would be an enormous boon to researchers. Reading the handwriting would be really hard, and it would be a massive effort to move all that paper. Just handling it is hard; it's not like flipping through mass-manufactured books. But I suspect that you could spend a few million dollars to revolutionize the field.
- order-matters 4mo ago>automate transcription this also means trusting the LLM to decide what things mean. but there is very likely a great middle ground of having LLMs take their best guesses and then verifying the output on significant finds. the risk is in LLM understating something important, false negatives, leading to putting stuff at the bottom of the pile that appears mundane but isnt
- K2Short 4mo agoI hope we get to hear his new/old music. That would be amazing
- nasso_dev 4mo agofrench radio "France Musique" aired it the other day, i don't know if its available outside of france though
- mmmattt 4mo agoIt was also played live for Fête de la musique in Paris last Sunday.
- throwpoaster 4mo agoPerhaps here: https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP
- LeoPanthera 4mo ago"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." Tom Lehrer.
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agoMozart lived for 35 years Lehrer did 97
- irishcoffee 4mo agoIt is possible Lehrer said that before his last day on earth. Sometime around age 37 would make sense.
- ggm 4mo ago(Lehrer was a mathematician) he did the maths! Well.. arithmetic.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoWas that the new math or the old?
- assimpleaspossi 4mo agoIn fact, I had the original album from the 1960s and, yes, that's where I heard the line.
- palmotea 4mo ago> Lehrer did [sic] 97 FYI, most people speak the vast majority of their quotes before the day they die.
- VeninVidiaVicii 4mo agoThe reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
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- mrighele 4mo agoI love his handwriting style. I wonder if it was the first draft or a copy [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqfpkTTy2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqfpkTTy2w
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- coliveira 4mo agoComposers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.
- breezybottom 4mo agoYou've named one composer who is. I don't see where the inductive step applies.
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- rob74 4mo agoThe composers who didn't have neat handwriting are forgotten today because nobody could read their (musical) notes...
- Arainach 4mo agoThis is simply not true. Look at Beethoven's manuscripts for instance. https://guides.loc.gov/beethoven/manuscripts https://guides.loc.gov/beethoven/manuscripts
- globular-toast 4mo agoWow. Can we even be sure we're listening to the right thing? Is it actually possible to read this unambiguously or is there an element of context when reading music, similar to how if you're reading prose the next word is probably grammatically correct and makes sense?
- jansan 4mo agoLet's hope it is more authentic than the Hitler Diaries[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
- dcminter 4mo agoAny 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!
- spacechild1 4mo agoThe whole affair was bizarre. At one point Kujau, the author of the fake diaries, ran out of ideas and let Hitler complain about his flatulence. There is also a very funny German movie about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schtonk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schtonk!) The director later said that he intentionally omitted some facts about the real scandal because the audience would find it too far fetched.
- dcminter 4mo agoI think my favourite aspect of the tale (at least as Harris tells it) is that Kujau was such a bad forger, and the recipients wanted it all to be true so badly that they skipped several opportunities to actually check! I shall see if I can find Schtonk! with subtitles, sounds up my alley.
- spacechild1 4mo agoYes! Like when Kujau couldn't get the letter A, so he went with "FH" instead of "AH" for the cover initials. Heidemann convinced the people at Stern that it surely stands for "Führer Hitler" :-D Schtonk! does a really great job at satirizing the Führerkult that was still very much present in large parts of German society.
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- gcanyon 4mo ago> the Duke failed to pay Mozart for his work You stiffed Mozart!? A curse on your ghost!
- Waterluvian 4mo agoWorse could happen. The Duke could have thrown him in the castle jail.
- throwpoaster 4mo agoHear perhaps here: https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP
- copperx 4mo agoPerhaps?
- kevinten10 4mo ago[flagged]
- genxy 4mo agoIf you like a discovered manuscript story, you should see "In the Hands of Dante", great movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333644/ 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-dante-review-gerard-butler-julian-schnabel-martin-scorsese-al-pacino 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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333644/ratings/ how different the Iranian ratings are vs the UK.
- listenfaster 4mo agoThe library where the discovery was made: https://www.bnf.fr/en/actualitesEN/discovery-unpublished-autograph-manuscript-mozart-bnf-music-department 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.
- bit_economist 4mo agoThere 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-flute-harp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/arts/music/mozart-music-f...
- Insanity 4mo agoAt least they didn't use quotation marks for "emphasis".
- MyHonestOpinon 4mo agoWhile interesting. Is it a 'Major discovery' ?
- Mistletoe 4mo agoThey aren’t making more Mozart notebooks so probably.
- cvoss 4mo agoMozart 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.
- isjcjwndkwmds 4mo agoWhy wouldn’t it be? Heck, how could it not be?
- HugoMoran 4mo agoseems like more of a minor discovery to me
- cineticdaffodil 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leck_mir_den_Arsch_fein_recht_sch%C3%B6n_sauber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leck_mir_den_Arsch_fein_recht_...
- nelox 4mo agoThe 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-du-jour/decouverte-d-un-manuscrit-inedit-de-mozart-a-la-bnf-les-coulisses-d-une-operation-hors-norme-8710661 https://www.radiofrance.fr/francemusique/podcasts/l-invite-e...