"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."
Tom Lehrer.
NooneAtAll3 7 hours ago [-]
Mozart lived for 35 years
Lehrer did 97
palmotea 3 hours ago [-]
> Lehrer did [sic] 97
FYI, most people speak the vast majority of their quotes before the day they die.
hbn 2 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately for Lehrer he embarrassed himself in his final words by misremembering how long Mozart lived
simonh 2 hours ago [-]
He’ll never live it down.
lubujackson 2 hours ago [-]
Classic old guy
VeninVidiaVicii 3 hours ago [-]
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
irishcoffee 6 hours ago [-]
It is possible Lehrer said that before his last day on earth. Sometime around age 37 would make sense.
assimpleaspossi 5 hours ago [-]
In fact, I had the original album from the 1960s and, yes, that's where I heard the line.
ggm 5 hours ago [-]
(Lehrer was a mathematician) he did the maths! Well.. arithmetic.
SoftTalker 1 hours ago [-]
Was that the new math or the old?
gcanyon 5 hours ago [-]
> the Duke failed to pay Mozart for his work
You stiffed Mozart!? A curse on your ghost!
wvbdmp 6 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 4 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what the article says... so yes apparently that's what it is
stinkbeetle 4 hours ago [-]
I have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook.
palmotea 3 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 3 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 3 hours ago [-]
Rich Corinthian leather! My dude!
rob74 4 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)...
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.
mpfect 8 hours ago [-]
Turns out "technical debt" also applies to national archives.
jfengel 2 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.
Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.
SoftTalker 1 hours ago [-]
Schools used to spend a lot of time on penmanship. I visited a high school where they had a wall of notes left by each senior class. In the notes from the 1950s the writing was quite refined and looked very practiced, and notes left by kids in the 2020s looked like 2nd grade printing by comparison. I don't think cursive handwriting is really even taught/required anymore.
I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Mozart that writing was a big point of emphasis in schools.
spacechild1 47 minutes ago [-]
Beethoven certainly wasn't.
breezybottom 4 hours ago [-]
You've named one composer who is. I don't see where the inductive step applies.
rob74 4 hours ago [-]
The composers who didn't have neat handwriting are forgotten today because nobody could read their (musical) notes...
Arainach 2 hours ago [-]
This is simply not true. Look at Beethoven's manuscripts for instance.
Wow. 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?
4 hours ago [-]
JasonFruit 55 minutes ago [-]
I see you've never worked your way through a manuscript by Donizetti.
K2Short 9 hours ago [-]
I hope we get to hear his new/old music. That would be amazing
nasso_dev 5 hours ago [-]
french radio "France Musique" aired it the other day, i don't know if its available outside of france though
mmmattt 3 hours ago [-]
It was also played live for Fête de la musique in Paris last Sunday.
Any 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 34 minutes ago [-]
The 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!) The director later said that he intentionally omitted some facts about the real scandal because the audience would find it too far fetched.
ggm 5 hours ago [-]
Confiscated during the revolution, kept by the national library. That's a bit different to "forged on schoolbooks with a Bic pen" provenance-wise.
pradeshhpatel 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
4 hours ago [-]
estetlinus 4 hours ago [-]
> By coincidence, Goy had been looking at other documents Mozart had written for teaching just weeks earlier
Color me sceptical
bell-cot 3 hours ago [-]
He was a niche-specialty career archivist, sorting through his library's collection of stuff from the right era and area. That is the discovery story behind a rather large fraction of such documents.
estetlinus 3 hours ago [-]
So not much a coincidence I’d say. Very much by design.
nok22kon 3 hours ago [-]
parallel construction
bell-cot 5 hours ago [-]
Even inside the tiny niche of the classical music history world, a book of daily exercises - written for some now-obscure student, and owned by a national library - is actually a pretty minor thing.
Very few counterfeiters bother doing nickles and dimes.
NopIdoN 1 hours ago [-]
BTW the metal in a nickel is worth about 7 cents.
kevinten10 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
abstractspoon 6 days ago [-]
Anyone remember the Hitler diaries?
Rendered at 16:53:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Here is a more reputable article for this news story: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/arts/music/mozart-music-f...
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.
Tom Lehrer.
Lehrer did 97
FYI, most people speak the vast majority of their quotes before the day they die.
You stiffed Mozart!? A curse on your ghost!
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.
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/
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqfpkTTy2w
I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Mozart that writing was a big point of emphasis in schools.
https://guides.loc.gov/beethoven/manuscripts
https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
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!
There is also a very funny German movie about it (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.
Color me sceptical
Very few counterfeiters bother doing nickles and dimes.