Paris loved the boy Mozart, but the feeling wasn’t mutual

THIS year, cities across Europe are sponsoring concerts and tours to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Many places beyond Salzburg, Austria, where Mozart was born in 1756, and Vienna, where he died in 1791, can claim connections to him because, besides being a composer of genius, he was a great traveler. Mozart spent 10 of his 35 years on the road, performing, composing and looking for work.

As a child prodigy, he first visited Paris in 1763 and 1764 before going to England, stopped in the city again in 1766 on his way home and then returned in 1778. So I sought him out here, even though he wasn’t altogether enraptured by the City of Light.

By the time of his second visit at age 22, with only his mother, Anna Maria, as chaperon, the composer had developed a distaste for the need to bow and scrape to musically ignorant members of the French aristocracy on whom his career depended. Paris, he wrote to a friend, “is totally opposed to my genius, inclinations, knowledge and sympathies.... God grant only that I may not impair my talents by staying here.”

Still, Paris was an inescapable stop for any aspiring musician on tour in the 18th century: It was the capital of a strong, rich nation and epicenter of the Enlightenment. Mozart was here during the lifetimes of Rousseau and Voltaire and when France took up the cause of the American Revolution.

Mozart left light footprints here, partly because many of the places related to him no longer exist. For instance, the royal palace where several of his compositions premiered was burned by insurgents during the Communard rebellion of 1871; the beautiful Tuileries garden now occupies the site. Other apparent Mozart pilgrimage sites postdate the composer, such as the boulevard named for him on the western side of the city, in a 16th arrondissement neighborhood that grew up more than a century after his death.

It takes a little imagination to track the musical genius in Paris. But Paris and nearby Versailles were the scenes of several formative episodes in Mozart’s life. On his first visit, Mozart and his family went to Versailles, where they were entertained by Louis XV. When he returned to Paris 15 years later, his mother died of fever, shortly after the debut of his “Paris” Symphony.

Here are some of the places in and around the City of Light that still make a Mozart aficionado hear the opening strains of the “Paris” Symphony:

* When Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s father, arrived in Paris on Nov. 18, 1763, with his wife, 11-year old daughter Maria Anna (known as Nannerl) and Wolfgang, the family stayed in the town house of the Count van Eyck, the Bavarian ambassador to France, the Hotel Beauvais at 68 Rue de Francois-Miron in the stylish Marais quartier on the Right Bank. The building has been beautifully renovated and now serves as the city’s Administrative Court of Appeal.

You can step into the cobblestone courtyard and imagine the little family arriving in a carriage, weary but hopeful.

Nannerl’s clavier performances delighted salon society, but when it was Wolfgang’s turn to perform, audiences were astounded. He could play any music put before him and improvise for hours.

When the family returned to Paris in 1766 after a visit to London, Wolfgang performed for the Prince de Conti at the Palais du Temple. The building was later torn down, but there’s a charming painting of the occasion, “English Tea in the Salon of the Quatre-Glaces at the Palais du Temple” by Michel Barthelemy Ollivier, at the Chateau de Versailles.

* Versailles, about a 45-minute train ride from Paris, is another important destination for Mozart lovers because it was there that he found favor with the French royal family on New Year’s Day 1764. After the boy’s performance, the daughters of Louis XV cuddled and kissed Mozart, as did the king’s daughter-in-law Marie Antoinette.

When Mozart returned to France in 1778, he was offered a position as organist at Versailles, which he rejected. Still, his music will again echo there during a concert series dedicated to him, mounted by the Center for Baroque Music at Versailles, in November and December.

* Several Paris museums offer further traces of Mozart, especially the Music Museum at the Cite de la Musique in the 19th arrondissement. The museum is closed for renovation but will feature an exhibit on the creation of the composer’s “Paris” Symphony when the museum reopens in mid-September.

The Sully Wing at the Louvre displays French paintings from the period, including Fragonard’s “The Music Lesson,” which recalls Mozart’s employment as a composition teacher to the daughter of the Comte de Guines in 1778.

* Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony was first performed on June 18, 1778, in the Salle des Cent-Suisses at the Tuileries Palace. Afterward, to celebrate his triumph, the composer had some ice cream in a cafe at the Palais Royale, where le tout Paris congregated. Today, you can do the same thing at the Restaurant du Palais Royale or indulge in a gourmet dinner at Le Grand Vefour, one of the city’s oldest, most storied restaurants.

* Around the same time, Mozart’s mother fell ill and spent her last days half delirious, with Wolfgang at her bedside in a cold, cramped Right Bank apartment. She died July 3, 1778, and was buried in a cemetery once attached to the church of St. Eustache on the northern side of Les Halles. Her gravesite is lost, but in a St. Eustache side chapel dedicated to St. Cecilia, is a marble tablet commemorating her death.

Mozart left Paris a few months later, alone and disheartened, never dreaming that the city’s fabled light would eventually shine upon him.