Summary: <br> Leopold Mozart and his children Wolfgang and Marianne in Paris 1763/4; watercolor by Louis Carmontelle. Ludwig had a lithograph made from this painting which he widely distributed as an advertisement<br> <br> <br> <br> On November 18, 1763, 256 years ago today, the Mozart family – father Leopold, mother Anna Maria, daughter Marianne (12 years old) and son Wolfgang (7 years old) – arrived in Paris. They were in the midst of their “Grand Journey”, a 3½ year concert tour of Central and Western Europe that was to change the history of Western music. <br> <br> <br> <br> I would suggest that few peacetime activities are more harrowing and exhausting than concert tours. The endless travel wreaks havoc on the human body; the cookie-cutter hotels, restaurants, airports and airport lounges wreak havoc on the human psyche; the schlepping and rehearsing and having to summon the energy to treat every audience as if it were the only audience wreaks havoc on the human soul. And yet to make a living, musicians must perform, and that means they must tour. In doing so, they leave their wives, husbands, children, friends, and homes behind – and in the process anything approaching normalcy and routine – for the untamed wilderness of the road. <br> <br> <br> <br> I’m burning out just thinking about it.<br> <br> <br> <br> Some tours go on for months, and some go on for years. Between 2002 and 2005, Cher’s “Living Proof: The Farewell Tour” played 326 concerts, was attended by 3.5 million people and grossed $250 million (that’s $329 million in 2019 dollars). Between 2014 and 2017, “The Garth Brooks World Tour with Trisha Yearwood” played 366 concerts, was attended by 4.7 million people and grossed $364 million. <br> <br> <br> <br> (In terms of sheer attendance, the Ed Sheeran “÷ [‘Divide’] Tour” attracted 8.787 million live attendees over the course of its 255 shows between 2017 and 2019. In terms of sheer gross $, the present champion is the “U2 360° Tour”, which generated $820 million in 2019 dollars in 110 shows. Nearly a billion dollars. That’s a lot of money.)<br> <br> <br> <br> However: the great-grandmother of all of these tours, the one that put the phrase “concert tour” into our modern lexicon, was the tour taken by the Mozart family between June 9, 1763 and November 30, 1766, a tour that has come to be known as “The Grand Journey”.<br> <br> <br> <br> Leopold Mozart (1719-1787)<br> <br> <br> <br> On November 21, 1747, the 28-year-old Leopold Mozart – a musician from Augsburg (in today’s Germany) presently living in Vienna – married Anna Maria Pertl. The couple had seven children, though only two of them survived their infancy. The first was Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia, known as Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl; she was born on July 30 or 31, 1751. 4½ years later, a son was born on January 27, 1756 and named Johannes Christian Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart.<br> <br> <br> <br> Anna Maria Pertl Mozart (1720-1778)<br> <br> <br> <br> When she was 7 and her baby brother Wolfgang 3, Marianne began keyboard (harpsichord) lessons with her father. Almost immediately the young Wolfgang began to imitate his sister, initially, perhaps, to earn his share of attention from his father, Leopold. However, it quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary three-year-old boy banging upside a harpsichord. Leopold began giving Wolfgang lessons as well, and his progress was nothing short of astonishing. By four the child could learn to play fairly long pieces in a half an hour’s time; a few weeks after his fifth birthday he had written his first compositions; by six he had taught himself to play the violin well enough to participate in the playing of trios and quartets with adults. According to eyewitnesses, Wolfgang’s passion for music was so all-encompassing that he was interested in nothing else; even children’s games had to have some sort of ...
