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

Paris — 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 \o7arrondissement\f7 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: