Despite the fascinating life Paolo Litta led and the intriguing works he left behind, he and his music are still familiar only to a small number of musicians and musicologists.

Litta was born illegitimately in Stockholm in 1871, at which time an Italian man acknowledged him as his son. Whilst little is known about his childhood years, he seems to have studied in Germany before moving to Geneva, where he studied at the Académie de Musique with two remarkable pianists: the first of these was the eccentric Olga Janina, a pupil of Franz Liszt, with whom she maintained a troubled relationship; the second was Alfred Veit, an American who had studied with Antoine François Marmontel in Paris and with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna. Since the Académie de Musique in Geneva was founded in 1886 and Janina and Veit had left the Académie in 1886 and 1889 respectively, it is clear that Litta must have studied there during those few years. He then enrolled at the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels in September 1889 and began a period of intense involvement with Belgian cultural life.

Litta obtained a premier prix in piano with pianist-composer Arthur De Greef there in 1890 as well as a further premier prix in counterpoint and fugue with Hubert Ferdinand Kufferath one year later. These awards brought him concerts, initially in Belgium and soon in neighbouring lands as well.

He also began to present himself more and more as a composer: not only was he the soloist in Liszt's Concerto in E flat with the orchestra of the Kursaal in Blankenberge on 26 July 1891, but the orchestra also performed a new orchestral suite by him in the same concert. Litta became involved in the Brussels avantgarde artists' collective Les XX, an organisation that organised exhibitions and concerts between 1883 and 1893, and with whom he appeared as soloist in Rimsky-Korsakov's Piano Concerto, op.30, on 18 February 1892.

His concerto repertoire included not only works by Beethoven and Liszt but also the Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français by Vincent d'Indy, whom he had met at Les XX. Litta would perform several times with d'Indy, whose Poème des montagnes was to become one of Litta's warhorses.