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Posted by thunderbong 6 days ago

22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'(www.classicfm.com)
215 points | 64 comments
genxy 4 hours ago|
If you like a discovered manuscript story, you should see "In the Hands of Dante", great movie.

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-...

Side note, imdb's per country rating histograms are mesmerizing https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333644/ratings/ how different the Iranian ratings are vs the UK.

thrill 1 hour ago||
That looks pretty engaging - all the right people hate it.
genxy 5 minutes ago||
I do jump directly to the 1-star reviews, so there is that.
neves 15 minutes ago||
First step for a great features: movies hated by people you despise
bit_economist 1 hour ago||
There 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-f...

Insanity 1 hour ago|
At least they didn't use quotation marks for "emphasis".
LeoPanthera 9 hours ago||
"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

Tom Lehrer.

NooneAtAll3 8 hours ago|
Mozart lived for 35 years

Lehrer did 97

palmotea 4 hours ago|||
> Lehrer did [sic] 97

FYI, most people speak the vast majority of their quotes before the day they die.

hbn 3 hours ago|||
Unfortunately for Lehrer he embarrassed himself in his final words by misremembering how long Mozart lived
simonh 3 hours ago|||
He’ll never live it down.
lubujackson 3 hours ago|||
Classic old guy
VeninVidiaVicii 4 hours ago||||
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
latexr 1 hour ago|||
I sure hope they speak all of them before they die. Bit hard to understand a corpse.
irishcoffee 7 hours ago|||
It is possible Lehrer said that before his last day on earth. Sometime around age 37 would make sense.
assimpleaspossi 6 hours ago|||
In fact, I had the original album from the 1960s and, yes, that's where I heard the line.
ggm 6 hours ago|||
(Lehrer was a mathematician) he did the maths! Well.. arithmetic.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago||
Was that the new math or the old?
gcanyon 6 hours ago||
> the Duke failed to pay Mozart for his work

You stiffed Mozart!? A curse on your ghost!

MyHonestOpinon 1 hour ago||
While interesting. Is it a 'Major discovery' ?
Mistletoe 1 hour ago|
They aren’t making more Mozart notebooks so probably.
mpfect 9 hours ago||
Turns out "technical debt" also applies to national archives.
jfengel 3 hours ago|
More 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 1 hour ago||
I 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 30 minutes ago||
Oh, wow, that is actually an interesting application of ai
wvbdmp 5 days ago||
Apparently 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 5 hours ago|
That's exactly what the article says... so yes apparently that's what it is
stinkbeetle 5 hours ago||
I have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook.
palmotea 4 hours 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 4 hours ago||
One 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 4 hours ago||
Rich Corinthian leather! My dude!
rob74 5 hours ago|||
Note-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)...
listenfaster 2 hours ago||
The library where the discovery was made:

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.

throwpoaster 5 hours ago||
Hear perhaps here:

https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP

HugoMoran 1 hour ago|
seems like more of a minor discovery to me
alkyon 1 hour ago||
Seven previously unknown compositions for flute and harp is not minor
thrill 58 minutes ago||
don't fret over dark keys
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