A pile of anonymous manuscripts at France’s National Library has turned up an unexpected find, a long-forgotten Mozart manuscript that will be performed in public for the first time this weekend in Paris.
The newly rediscovered work was composed in 1778, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was 22. Musicians will publicly interpret the music for flute and harp on Sunday at the National Library, or BnF, in what the library has called a “major discovery”.
Francois-Pierre Goy, a curator in the library’s music department, found the manuscript while examining anonymous documents he wanted to sort through before retirement.
“I never imagined what I was about to find,” he told AFP.
The 44-page notebook contains a dozen daily exercises Mozart gave Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnieres de Guines from May to July 1778, along with seven pieces for flute and harp, Goy said.
She was an excellent harpist and the daughter of the Duke of Guines, who was a renowned flautist. Mozart wrote the music while teaching the aristocratic French student.
“It just so happened that I had been looking at some of Mozart’s teaching material a few weeks earlier,” Goy said.
He said he then noticed similarities, including “the treble clefs that are quite rounded and tilted slightly forward”, and bass clefs drawn in the opposite direction from how they usually are in France.
“Could it be him?” Goy said he thought to himself.
According to Goy, comparisons with Mozart’s other handwritten works, the French paper used, and stamps on the notebook that matched those on a French copy of Mozart’s “Concerto for Flute and Harp”, commissioned by the Duke of Guines, all pointed to Mozart.
Armin Brinzing, director of the Austria-based Mozarteum Foundation, authenticated the document in April.
The library said the manuscript “is part of two bundles of music that were confiscated from the home of the Duke of Guines in 1794” during the French Revolution, and later ended up at the BnF.
Mozart died in 1791 at the age of 35.
Discoveries like this “for such a famous composer are almost unheard of”, said Mathias Auclair, director of the BnF’s music department.
Several Mozart compositions have been rediscovered in recent years. In 2012, a Mozart piano piece composed when he was 11 was found in an Austrian attic.
For harpists and flautists, who have “very little repertoire” available to them, the discovery at the BnF is a wonderful surprise, Auclair said.
BnF president Gilles Pecout said the new music sheets shed light on Mozart as a young teacher and document his last stay in Paris in 1778, “on which there is scant information”.
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