The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has discovered and identified an unpublished manuscript by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). The booklet contains 44 pages of composition exercises as well as seven pieces for flute and harp, the institution announced on Friday. It is a valuable document for the study of Mozart's composition theory and its oldest surviving record.

Manuscript by
Mozart and Mlle de Guines

The composer wrote the music during his last stay in Paris in 1778. Between May and July, Mozart taught the harpist Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes (1759–1795). The last six pages of the notebook are blank; the final exercise remained unfinished. The attribution of the manuscript was confirmed by Armin Brinzing, director of the Bibliotheca Mozartiana at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

According to experts, the discovery is one of the most important of recent decades, explained Gilles Pècoute, President of the French National Library. It allows Mozart's last stay in Paris to be documented and shows the young teacher in dialogue with a student.

The music will be performed publicly for the first time this coming Sunday (June 21) in the Oval Hall of the old Bibliothèque nationale (Site Richelieu-Louvois). Two musicians from the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France – solo flautist Mathilde Calderini and harpist Nicolas Tulliez – will perform it.

According to its own statements, the music department of the French National Library possesses the third largest collection of Mozart's signed music manuscripts, after the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the composer's birthplace, and the Berlin State Library.

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