Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  The starling’s mimicry is not surprising in the least—as birds in the mynah family, starlings are among the most capable animal mimics on earth, rivaling parrots in their ability to expertly imitate birds, musical instruments, and any other sounds and noises, including the human voice. But how did the starling in the shop learn Mozart’s motif? The composition was meant to be an absolute secret, not slated for public performance until mid-June, when it would premiere under Mozart’s direction with the gifted young student for whom it was written, Barbara Ployer, at the piano.

  Mozart was so delighted by the starling he almost forgot his shock. He and the bird whistled phrases back and forth, sharing snippets of their repertoires. Then Mozart pulled out his pocket notebook and copied out the bird’s species name, Vogel Stahrl, a version of the German name for the bird referred to as the European starling in North America and the common starling in England.* One commentator claims that Mozart named his bird Star, a misreading of his note that simply referred to the species. Even so, it is handy to employ a moniker in telling a story, and as there is no record of the bird’s actual name, Star will do nicely.

  This story is not well known in its details, and some musicologists, acquainted with only the surface of the tale, claim that Mozart must have responded in a jealous fury to the bird’s pirated rendition of his own composition. But when we look into the composer’s pocket notebook, we see that nothing could be further from the truth. Beneath the words Vogel Stahrl, Mozart wrote his own version of the tune, then the starling’s version.

  Mozart’s motif.

  The starling’s song.

  His comment on the starling’s interpretation? Das war schön! “That was wonderful!”

  It would not have been at all odd for Mozart to keep a bird. Pet birds were popular in eighteenth-century Europe, part of the natural-history trend that characterized Enlightenment attitudes in polite society. Facilitated by an emerging international shipping trade, exotic birds such as parrots and mynahs, as well as animals ranging from wombats and kangaroos to great land tortoises, made their way into public menageries and into increasingly popular animal-and bird-merchant shops. (“Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat?” Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his brother in 1869 while waiting impatiently for his new pet to make its way across the sea from Australia to England.)

  Exotic birds were expensive. In The Georgian Menagerie, cultural historian Christopher Plumb writes that a parrot could cost as much as a typical servant earned in a whole year, and bird-selling was good business for high-end shopkeepers who could afford to have the exotic species shipped in from Africa and Australia. But it was the trade in native birds such as chaffinches, bullfinches, doves, and sometimes starlings that made pet birds accessible to a wider population, bringing both decorative and musical interest to the middle-class salon.

  Little is known about the local bird catchers, many of whom lived in near poverty at the fringes of society. They would catch, raise, and sell birds to vendors with proper shops, or sometimes they would sell the birds themselves, along with simple homemade cages, from seasonal street stalls rented with their last pfennigs. These were often family ventures, with tatterdemalion youngsters sent into the fields and woodlands to check progress on nests and eggs. Nestlings were pilfered and raised until they were grown, sturdy, and ready for sale. Though the work was socially unrespected, it was not unskilled. Local bird catchers might have been functionally illiterate, but they had to be accomplished natural historians, knowing how to identify and name species, find nests, and monitor the laying of eggs and the fledging of young. They had to know how to hand-raise birds, diagnose health issues, and sometimes cure them. They had to be thieves, scientists, veterinarians, and businesspeople, all at once. And yet, as Plumb points out, most of what we know of these tradespeople comes from court records in which they are accused of drunkenness, robbery, or petty crimes. It seems they were never considered part of the society in which the birds they raised found homes.

  It was surely one of these skilled ruffians who hand-raised the starling Mozart chose before it arrived at the shop; the bird was tame and friendly, and the practiced shopkeeper had no trouble catching it and depositing it in a small wooden box lined with natural grasses that Mozart carried home to his wife, Constanze, whistling all the while.

  Mozart’s walk was a short one, but the noonday streets were bustling with horses, wagons, and hackney carriages. Several of the city’s many homeless dogs brushed his legs, but they ignored the maestro and his mysterious box, intent on getting to the stalls of the street vendors who migrated from the suburbs each morning with their offerings of eggs, meats, cheeses, and wines; a well-behaved dog who sat quietly would get plenty of scraps. There was high-piled hair and the flouncing of hoopskirts, now in their last decade of popularity. There was the fragrance of roasting chestnuts and the smoke of kitchen fires and the manure from the carriage horses. There was, occasionally, the song of a street musician. On a normal day, Mozart had an eye and ear for all of this life—life everywhere was a thing to be drunk up and poured out again in his music. But this day he took no notice of anything. His mind was all on the little box. Mozart whispered to the bird within, maybe telling him about his new home. Meanwhile, Star, who had loved this man’s voice in the shop, was now huddled into the darkest corner of his tiny crate, wide-eyed and silent. He was tame, yes, but no starling likes to be stuffed into a coffer and carried about. The poor bird was terrified.

  Soon, Mozart reached his apartment at 29 Graben, a fashionable address—the Graben was then, as now, the central shopping and fashion district. The Mozarts’ rooms were not spacious, but it was just the two of them, Wolfgang and Constanze, along with their small dog, Gauckerl, and now Star. Perhaps Wolfgang thought this new bird might bring a cheering presence to the house. The couple’s first baby, little Raimund Leopold, had died the previous year when he was just six weeks old. He had been in the care of a wet nurse while Constanze and Wolfgang were in Salzburg visiting the elder Leopold—Mozart’s attempt to sow goodwill between father and wife (though Leopold had never met Constanze, he was against the match from the start). The couple had left Raimund fat and happy, and Mozart blamed the child’s death on their decision to raise him on breast milk rather than water and coarse-milled oats, as was commonly (and disastrously) recommended by the medical men of the era. That May afternoon when Wolfgang turned up at the Graben apartment with his starling in a box, Constanze was five months pregnant with their second baby. The child would be named Carl Thomas, and of the Mozarts’ six children, he was one of just two who would survive to adulthood (it sounds shocking and sad, but this survival rate was a bit above average).

  In my imagining, Constanze was bemused and also a bit put out at the new housemate (what pregnant woman needs something else to take care of?), but she could not have been surprised. She knew that her husband had been fond of pet birds from childhood—singing canaries, mostly. Any consternation she felt was dispelled by Wolfgang’s unabashed joy. Star was unnerved by his short journey but settled quickly into his new cage, as these intelligent birds do, without much thrashing about. Wild foods and seeds were typically sold at bird shops, but most likely Star simply shared the family diet, feasting on bits and leftovers from the Mozarts’ table, fed to him by hand or left in his cage. Starlings are omnivores, and the varied scraps from an eighteenth-century middle-class Viennese kitchen—meat, potatoes, fruits, and plenty of pastries—probably offered just the right fat-protein balance for little Star. (Carmen loves to nibble our leftovers; her favorites include lentils, spaghetti, and couscous salad.)

  It is not known whether Constanze had any childhood pets, but since her father, Fridolin Weber, was a restive jack-of-all-musical-trades, their lifestyle was probably too unsettled for animals. Constanze, who grew up in the cultural and intellectual center of Mannheim, was the second of four Weber sisters, all of whom had classically trained voices. During Constanze’s teen years, the family moved frequent
ly to promote the singing career of the eldest sister, Aloysia.

  Mozart was born and reared in provincial Salzburg but traveled widely throughout Europe as a child prodigy, performing on the violin and pianoforte alongside his sister Maria Anna (always called Nannerl), a brilliant pianist in her own right. The children were usually accompanied by both parents on these long and expensive journeys, which were fraught with the many dangers of carriage travel: poor roads, inclement weather, exposure to disease. Wolfgang was often sick and near death more than once. His short stature was the subject of public and medical comment and a concern to Leopold. Ill health would plague him always.

  There came a time when Leopold could no longer shirk his duties as Kapellmeister to the prince-archbishop of Salzburg in order to parade his young prodigies about Europe. So, beginning in 1777, Mozart’s mother, Anna Maria, chaperoned the twenty-one-year-old Wolfgang on a sixteen-month journey without Leopold (Nannerl stayed behind with her father to look after the household). The first months were spent in Mannheim, and then, at Leopold’s urging, mother and son continued to Paris. While Wolfgang gallivanted about the city, teaching, composing, giving recitals, dandying, and attempting to ingratiate himself with potential patrons among the royalty and aristocracy, Anna Maria, who could not go about unaccompanied in polite society, languished in their dank rooms. “The stairs are so narrow,” she wrote to Leopold, “that it would be impossible to carry up a klavier. Wolfgang cannot compose at home. I never see him all the long day and shall forget altogether how to talk.” She fell ill in Paris and died fairly quickly, a tragedy from which Mozart’s spirit never fully healed.

  Young Mozart, alone in Paris with the body of his mother, could not bring himself to tell his father and sister what had happened. He lied in a letter to Leopold: “I have to bring you some very distressing and Sad news, which is the reason why I couldn’t reply earlier to your most recent letter.… My dear Mother is very ill—she was bled, just as she had it done always, and it was indeed necessary; afterward she felt somewhat better—” He engaged a friend in Salzburg to break the news to his father and didn’t write to Leopold with his own version of the truth for over a week. “I hope that you and my dear sister will forgive me for this small but necessary deception—when I thought about my own pain and sadness in relation to how it might affect you, I simply could not bring myself to overwhelm you with this distressing news.” Vestiges of guilt and worry later emerged in his doting, anxious concern for his wife (whom he could not bear to leave), for his children, for his dog, and, yes, for his starling.

  There is a heartbreaking oil portrait of the Mozarts that was commissioned after Anna Maria’s death. The two grown children sit at the fortepiano; their father, Leopold, stands in shadows with his violin; and their beloved mother appears behind them in an oval-framed painting, her hair piled high and wide and wound with a blue ribbon. This portrait of the family is a powerful and ghostly presence at the Mozart Geburtshaus now, hung in the back of the dark, windowless, wood-rich room where Wolfgang was born. It is a bit discomfiting to explore the rest of the exhibit with the family watching—rustling and whispering and mourning there in the corner.

  Mozart family portrait. (Johann Nepomuk della Croce, 1781)

  After his mother’s death, Mozart continued to travel extensively, but Salzburg was home base. As Mozart’s genius crystallized in his early twenties, the town began to feel too provincial to hold him. With difficulty, he tore himself away from his fretting but highly intelligent father.

  Leopold is misunderstood in the modern Mozart mythology. His difficult points—officiousness, anxiety, codependency, and condescending micromanagement of his family’s activities—are well documented; his controlling nature is so over the top that it’s almost funny, and there are thousands of examples of it in the family correspondence. When Anna Maria and Wolfgang were off traveling, Leopold wrote constantly, instructing his fully competent wife on the minutiae of business and life.

  Wherever you are, always make sure that the innkeeper puts the boot-trees in your boots.… The music can always remain in the front in the trunk, but you should buy a large oilcloth and use both this and the old one to wrap it well, in order to ensure that it’s really safe.… I shall send fresh socks by postal carriage.

  But Leopold loved his family rashly and dearly. He thoughtfully homeschooled his children, not just in music but in all subjects. He was a fine composer and a well-known violin pedagogue throughout Europe. Without Leopold, we would never have heard of Wolfgang Mozart.

  Even so, the relationship between father and son would always be fraught. As Mozart grew into a young adult, Leopold could not keep from insinuating himself into every aspect of Mozart’s life. No matter where Wolfgang traveled, Leopold would send letter after disapproving letter, insisting that Wolfgang find more ways to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy, improve his connections with famous composers, and, always, make more money; the letters were full of detailed advice on exactly how Wolfgang should go about accomplishing all these things. His love for Wolfgang shone through without fail, yet he could not help constantly reminding his son how much the family had laid out for travel and clothes and lodging in service to Wolfgang’s genius. He deployed a complicated cloud of guilt, love, and indebtedness that followed his son everywhere, and always.

  After his wife’s passing, Leopold became even more clingy, anxious, and controlling, and Wolfgang’s desire to leave Salzburg did not help. Mozart provoked his own dismissal from his underpaid employ with Salzburg’s Archbishop Colloredo and fairly ran away to Vienna, leaving his talented sister behind in the throes of depression. Nannerl was now the keeper of her father’s household and knew she had only two options open to her: live as a respectable spinster, or marry. Both options required that she give up her life as a musician. Leopold was focused entirely on Wolfgang and no longer promoted his daughter’s talents. She spent days in bed, suffering under the stark truth of what her life was to become. (Eventually she would marry, though not happily.) The spectacularly talented Nannerl stopped playing the pianoforte.

  When Wolfgang and his mother were in Mannheim, they met the musical Weber family. Mozart scarcely noticed Constanze, besotted as he was by the eldest sister, Aloysia, with her fashionable beauty and her diva’s soprano. Mozart concocted a wild plan in which he would run away with Aloysia to Paris and compose arias for her pure voice that would make them both famous. He wrote all about it to his father: Would Leopold tell him what a prima donna earned in Verona?

  Poor Leopold! When he read Wolfgang’s long missive outlining the naive scheme, he fell into absolute fits. “My Dear Son,” he wrote, “I’ve read through your letter of the 4th with bewilderment and shock.” Leopold claimed to be so distressed that he had not slept the entire previous night and as a result was so exhausted that he could hardly write and struggled with each word. This did not stop him from composing a letter that was dozens of pages long, expounding in great detail on the folly of his son’s plan, which seemed, to Leopold, like a far-fetched fantasy that would make social lepers of the entire family. “How could you allow yourself even for a moment to be taken in by such an appalling idea… to cast aside your reputation—your old parents, your dear sister?… To expose me to mockery and yourself to contempt?” Finally, he turned to his favored method of twisting the knife: guilt. “Remember me as you saw me when you left us, standing wretchedly beside your carriage; remember, too, that, although a sick man, I’d been up till 2 o’clock, doing your packing, and was at your carriage again at 6, seeing to everything for you—afflict me now if you can be so cruel!”

  But in the end Leopold needn’t have worried, at least not about the eldest Weber daughter. Aloysia swiftly jilted Wolfgang and married the more mature, financially solvent (and much taller) Joseph Lange, an actor, singer, and portrait painter. Mozart, meanwhile, traveled all over Europe, composing and performing, and eventually returned to Vienna, where the Webers now lived. Herr Weber had since passed, and Frau
Weber was taking in boarders to help make ends meet. Mozart roomed at the Weber home for some weeks, and during this time he tidily transferred his affections from Aloysia to her sister Constanze. Wolfgang’s affections for Constanze might have been less youthfully wild than his infatuation with Aloysia, but they were sincere. He intended to marry her.

  Leopold was in a disapproving tizzy over the impending nuptials. For years he had been meticulously plotting the course of his son’s fame. Now Wolfgang wanted to derail his own chances for renown and esteem by marrying? And into a family whose name meant nothing, who had no money, no prospects, no sons to ensure future income? Leopold despised the lot of them, sight unseen. But Wolfgang was twenty-five years old and ready to settle down. He was comfortable with the Webers, and through simple proximity, he and Constanze had developed a dear friendship and then, over the months, an intense affinity. He wrote to his father with trepidation but was firm in his resolve:

  The middle one, my good, dear Constanze, is the martyr of the family, and probably for that very reason, is the kindest-hearted, the cleverest, in short the best of them all.

  Hoping to appeal to Leopold’s concerns over economy, he emphasized Constanze’s practical virtues:

  I must make you better acquainted with the character of my beloved Constanze;—she is not ugly, but also not really beautiful;—her whole beauty consists of two little black eyes and a graceful figure. She has no great wit but enough common sense… she is not extravagant in her appearance, rumors to that effect are totally false;—to the contrary, she is in the habit of dressing very simply… and most of the things a woman needs, she can make herself; indeed, she does her own hair every day.* She knows all about householding and has the kindest heart in the world—I love her and she loves me with all her heart—now tell me whether I could wish for a better wife?