François-Pierre Goy, a curator in the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was working through a pile of anonymous manuscripts before his retirement. On 2 February, he opened a small, untitled notebook that, as he later put it, “ne paie pas de mine” — it did not look like much. As he scanned the staves, certain details caught his eye: the treble clefs were rounded and tilted slightly forward, the bass clefs drawn in the opposite direction from the French norm. He had been studying Mozart’s pedagogical manuscripts weeks earlier. “Could it be him?” he thought. The handwriting, the French paper, the stamps matching a copy of the Concerto for Flute and Harp commissioned by the Duke of Guînes — all pointed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Specialists from the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg authenticated the 44-page notebook in April. It contained a dozen daily composition exercises and seven pieces for flute and harp, given to Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes, the duke’s harpist daughter, during Mozart’s last stay in Paris in 1778.

The notebook had been confiscated from the Duke of Guînes’s home in 1794, during the French Revolution, and eventually entered the BnF’s collections, uncatalogued and unstamped. For over two centuries it sat among bundles of music, its authorship unknown. Now the seven pieces — about twenty minutes of music — were to be performed for the first time on 21 June, the Fête de la Musique, by flautist Mathilde Caldérini and harpist Nicolas Tulliez of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. The musicians received the scores just a week before the recording, under conditions of secrecy. The pieces show Mozart’s teaching method: he would write the harp part and ask the duchess to complete the flute part, then they would swap roles. “The hands of the master and the pupil mingle,” the BnF noted.

Such finds, while rare for a composer as famous as Mozart, are not isolated. In Algeria, the foreign ministry recently acquired a 17th-century manuscript — a commentary on an astronomical text by the scholar Sahnun ibn Uthman al-Wansharisi — that had surfaced at a Paris auction, repatriating what officials called a “cultural treasure” to the national heritage. In Budapest, a music antiquarian presented a pencil-written score from 1907: Béla Bartók’s harmonisation of a melody by his violin student Stefi Geyer, the object of an unrequited love that haunted his compositions for decades. The four notes of the “Stefi chord” — D, F♯, A, C♯ — became a leitmotif of idealised desire and bitter rejection, surfacing in his first violin concerto and later works. These recoveries, whether from auction houses, library stacks, or private attics, underscore how much of the cultural record remains dormant, awaiting a trained eye.

Meanwhile, beneath the forecourt of Notre Dame cathedral, archaeologists have been sifting through layers of Parisian history in what French media have called the “dig of the century.” The excavation, part of the square’s renovation after the 2019 fire, has yielded a 4th-century Roman coin bearing Emperor Constantine, medieval grain pits, a repurposed Roman doorstep, and pottery fragments with reddish markings that experts have yet to decipher. “It makes the city feel less like a postcard and more like something still being discovered,” one archaeology student told the Associated Press. The dig aims to reach evidence of the Gauls, predating the Romans, pushing the known timeline of the city further back.

On Sunday, in the Oval Room of the BnF, the first notes of Mozart’s forgotten pieces will sound for an invited audience, the manuscript displayed nearby. The music, unheard for 248 years, will then be broadcast on France Musique. It is a reminder that the past is not a sealed vault but a landscape of buried signals — a rounded treble clef, a reddish mark on a medieval jug, a chord of four notes — waiting for someone to pause and recognise them.