And if so, when were they discovered? Were they known during their time? Were any events affected positively or negatively by it?
The Wicked Bible is a famous example. The royal printers, while making a new edition of the King James Bible, mis-set one page, and wound up printing a bunch of Bibles with one single word missing... the "not" in "thou shalt not commit adultery."
Every copy was ordered destroyed, and very few survive; the printers were deprived of their license to operate a printing press and fined 300 pounds.
Music notation is a peculiar form of writing, and "classical music" has become a strange kind of music.
During the 20th century, classical music developed an obsession with perfection: playing each and every note perfectly, from the "correct" edition of the work. No funny business here, everything has to be perfect (not everybody is that crazy, but in general that has become the default attitude). Apparently, this was not the case before. People modified scores, improvised. Early recordings suggest people were much less concerned about wrong notes than what we can find in more recent ones.
Anyways, Jonathan Del Mar (a British conductor, musicologist and editor) started to rock the boat in the (19)80s, pointing out errors in the accepted editions of Beethoven's symphonies. After decades of work, he found errors introduced since the 19th century.
That does not make any sense, right? Beethoven is a household name, people have written A LOT about him and his music, his symphonies have been played pretty much non-stop during a very long time, every orchestra plays them, and there are bloody wrong notes?! Yep, copyists made little mistakes and then it went unnoticed. And then some more mistakes were added, and people got used to that...
After Del Mar spent a hell of a lot of time comparing Beethoven's manuscripts with a lot of editions, he produced his own indicating where things had changed. It's not like the music is now completely different, but we still have these small discrepancies. Are we actually playing the music Beethoven wrote? (Ok, that is a huge can of worms of a question).
Weird things happened after Del Mar's editions. He said
"There’s a note I’ve corrected in the Choral Symphony that Claudio Abbado refuses to acknowledge"
Yes. Super famous top notch conductor Claudio Abbado (who died about a year ago) said no thank you, I am not interested in changing what we play. I don't care if it is not what Beethoven wrote.
Del Mar says
"But he must accept that he’s playing a note that was changed in the 1860s, some 30 years after Beethoven’s death."
Well, yeah. I don't know exactly what Abbado's reason was, but I have to mention that it's not a night-day kind of difference if you change some notes. The difference is not as huge as when you have a typo when texting somebody.
And the weirdness continues
"Simon Rattle phoned me about the French horns in the same symphony, and asked: 'What am I going to tell the orchestra?'"
Good question, super start conductor Sir Simon Rattle, good question. "Hey guys. So, apparently everybody has been playing the damn thing wrong since who knows when. Yeah, please be extra careful and play what is written in the new edition. I know you can play this with your eyes closed, but you have been playing it slightly different, so..."
One of the most prestigious conductors in the world calls the guy who edited a score to ask "What am I going to tell the orchestra?" because of several notes in a work that is almost 1 hour long.
What kind of madness is this? Classical music became kind of peculiar, I guess.
Why hadn't anybody noticed that? Del Mar says questions started to be asked in the 1930s, but they were difficult to be answered because manuscripts were kept in private collections in distant places. And then there was WW II, and it was difficult to get access to the scores owned by the German state because of the Nazis... Scores weren't resurfacing until decades later.
Here's a page from Beethoven's manuscript of the 9th symphony.
Another example here, plus links to a few examples of other miscommunications
Not sure if these count as "famous typos" but if you're looking for typos in historical documents, the Journals of Lewis and Clark are a good place to start.
The signed copy of the Declaration of Independence has at least two "typos" (technically not the right term, since it was handwritten by Timothy Matlack) that I know of.
The first appears 16 lines down from the top, slightly left of center, refers to the King and reads: "He has dissolved Represtative Houses repeatedly..." There's a small caret underneath the misspelled word adding the missing "en."
The second appears 10 lines directly above John Hancock's signature. The line is supposed to read: "Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury." The only problem is, Mr. Matlack forgot to include the "only," necessitating another caret to add the missing word.
You can find both of these "typos" using this hi-res iamge of the much easier to read 1823 fascimile.
The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution says, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union". Obviously if something is perfect, it can't be made more perfect. But it's never been corrected and no one really makes a fuss about changing it
