As early as 1773, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) started talking about leaving his hometown Salzburg. He lamented the lowbrow tastes of its citizens and disliked writing music for its “coarse, slovenly, dissolute court musicians.” “Salzburg is no place for me,” he wrote to his father from Munich in 1777, where he openly advertised his availability for a permanent job.

It was Paris that held the greatest allure for the young Mozart. He went there at the age of twenty-two, accompanied by his mother, in March 1778. Except for the symphony he composed, his stay, which lasted just over six months, was a disappointment and a personal tragedy. Throughout their stay, his mother grew increasingly bored and unwell. She died in Paris early in July, shortly after the premiere of the new symphony.

When Mozart began to work on his symphony he had new ideas he had accumulated from his recent travels, particularly in Munich and Mannheim. In addition the resources available in Parisian orchestras, which were bigger than any he had ever heard (and filled with many superb players), prompted him to expand his palette, adding flutes and timpani, and, for the first time in his symphonies, clarinets as well. He scored his new symphony for the largest orchestra he had ever employed.

Like so many things in Mozart’s Paris sojourn, the rehearsals for his new symphony did not go well. “I was really frightened,” Mozart wrote home. “All my life I have heard nothing worse; you can’t imagine how they botched the symphony twice in a row and scratched away at it.” He asked for another rehearsal. There was no time, he was told. He went to bed that night “in a discontented and angry frame of mind,” and when he awoke in the morning he decided not to attend the concert. But then he changed his mind, only to discover that the Paris public was wild about his new music.

“In the middle of the opening allegro,” he wrote to his father, “there is a passage that I knew people would like; the whole audience was carried away by it, and there was tremendous applause”—during the movement, as well as at its conclusion. Having been told that Parisians liked their finales to begin boldly and loudly, using all the instruments on stage, Mozart deliberately began his quietly and with just the violins. When the full ensemble then burst in, after eight measures, the first-night audience started to clap, enjoying not only the music but the joke. “I was so happy,” Mozart said, “as soon as the symphony was over I went off to the Palais Royal and had a large ice.”