NYT: Here’s What ‘the Most Important Mozart Discovery in Decades’ Sounds Like

That may have been exasperating for Mozart, but it has given posterity a spectacular gift. On Friday, the National Library of France announced the discovery of a 44-page notebook from de Guînes’s lessons. The notebook offers an extraordinary window into Mozart’s teaching method, showing his corrections and improvements on de Guînes’s work. The discovery also yields repertoire pieces marked by Mozart’s imagination: seven previously unknown works for flute and harp. Experts say that while de Guînes composed these works under her teacher’s guidance, Mozart penned a substantial portion of the music himself.

“This is the most important Mozart discovery in decades,” Armin Brinzing, the director of the Mozart Library at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, said in a phone interview.

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“It was not so easy, to guess who wrote what,” Caldérini said.

She also wondered whether Mozart was being overly harsh with his student. “He was very demanding, because he was so talented and so young,” she said. “Maybe he couldn’t understand that it was not so easy for someone else to compose.”

Interesting little story.

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