A Times story from last week says that a photograph of Mozart’s wife Constanze has been found in a German archive.

This feels quite incredible, because you don’t consider Mozart and photography to be contemporaries.

It’s only possible because Mozart’s wife was six years younger than him, and also outlived him by a considerable margin. Had Mozart not died so young, he might have lived to see photography. Photographic processes were working by July 1839, only 48 years after Mozart’s death at the age of 34 in 1791.