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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
The publisher was generally familiar with Beethoven’s writing and conventions. He’d prepare galleys that Beethoven would proof (and frequently edit). A substantial part of Beethoven’s known correspondence concerns corrections to galleys (and managing payments).
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!
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.
I think my favourite aspect of the tale (at least as Harris tells it) is that Kujau was such a bad forger, and the recipients wanted it all to be true so badly that they skipped several opportunities to actually check!
I shall see if I can find Schtonk! with subtitles, sounds up my alley.
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.
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.