This passage on young Mozart in Paris is derived from an article that first appeared in French in the weekly journal L’Avantcoureur on 5 Mar 1764 (Dokumente, 30–31). As we show in our commentary to that article, versions of it were published at least seven times in two independent German translations between the end of Mar 1764 and 1766, the date of the version given here. The translation in the Neu-eröffneter Bilder-Saal is a slightly abridged version of one that first appeared in the Ordinari=Münchner=Zeitungen on 3 Apr 1764; this “Munich” translation also appeared in the Real-Zeitung (Erlang) on 28 Apr 1764. A second independent translation of the article from L’Avantcoureur was first published in the Hochfürstlich-Bambergische Wöchentliche Frag- und Anzeige-Nachrichten on 30 Mar 1764; versions of it subsequently appeared in the Wienerisches Diarium (no. 27, Wed, 4 Apr 1764), the Kurz=gefaßte Historische Nachrichten zum Behuf Der Neuern Europäischen Begebenheiten, Auf das Jahr 1764 (Regensburg, 14tes Stück, Apr 1764, 273–74 [= images 287–88]), and the Historisch-Moralische Belustigungen des Geistes (7. Stück, Hamburg, 1765). (For further details on these translations, see the entry for 5 Mar 1764.)

The Neu-eröffneter Historischer Bilder-Saal was a “universal” history by Andreas Lazarus von Imhof (1656–1704), first published in five volumes from 1692 to 1701. The title page of the first volume reads:

As the title page and frontispiece of the 1692 edition show, Imhof explicitly intended the history to be pedagogical, but the work rapidly became popular as a general historical reference for the educated classes, not just as a textbook for children. The individual volumes appeared in new editions, and the history was translated into Italian and French (the latter reputedly for the education of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia). New volumes continued to be added by anonymous authors after Imhof’s death, and the series eventually reached seventeen volumes.

The volume cited here is the fourteenth, published in 1766, covering the years 1761 to 1765, with explicit reference to the recently deceased Emperor Franz I (Francis Stephen of Lorraine), who is commemorated in the frontispiece and by a dedicatory poem. The appearance in the popular Bilder-Saal of this German version of the article from L’Avantcoureur, following the six known printings of that article in various German-language periodicals in 1764 and 1765, made it the most widely distributed description of the young Mozart prior to the famous report by Daines Barrington, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1771 (Dokumente, 86–92).