Mozart in Paris

In 1778, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart left Salzburg for Paris. The French capital promised to liberate the 22-year-old from his father's suffocating grip, and from a city unable to accommodate his genius. Yet, there was no grand entrance for the former child prodigy. When Mozart arrived in Paris, he was short on cash, unknown, and his French was poor. His mentor, the critic Baron von Grimm, introduced him to several Parisian nobles. However, recognition was hard-won, and at times the French court appeared indifferent to Mozart's talents and disapproving of his spontaneity.

Tracing the composer's six-month stay in the city of lights, Mozart in Paris dramatises the confrontation between a sparkle-eyed genius and mundane reality. Frantz Duchazeau spotlights a frustrating yet profoundly formative period of the composer's life – and in doing so, creates a living, breathing portrait of a man whose music, as Einstein famously said, "was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master."