Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Carmen will set immediately to her computer work. She loves to ride on my hands while I type, but more than this, she loves to flap, jump, and scamper across the keyboard. She tries to wedge her bill between the keys and the board, another example of the gaping behavior she uses to explore her world, and I worry that one day she will actually pop a key off or electrocute herself. It is difficult to believe that her computer play is all chance. She adds letters to documents, amends e-mails, erases e-mails, and sends e-mails before they are finished. She “likes” Facebook posts. Occasionally, her editing has improved a sentence, deleting one of the superfluous adverbs to which I am prone. Sometimes I stop to watch the movement of her rainbow-tinted feathers and her smart glistening eyes. After a minute she turns to look at me, as if to say, Ahem! More typing, please! How am I supposed to spoil your pitiful attempt to work if you won’t even do anything?

  Carmen oversees the writing of Mozart’s Starling. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

  Once Carmen tires of the computer, she turns to her second favorite form of studio play: finding something that is dangerous and stealing it. Somehow she intuits immediately when I want to take away an item that she has made her plaything, and when I reach for it, she will fly tauntingly out of reach. I have learned that when she finds pushpins, thumbtacks, rubber bands, or other things that could kill her if she decides to swallow them, my best strategy is reverse psychology. I affect perfect nonchalance, then pretend interest in a different shiny little object, something harmless, perhaps a large, unswallowable paper clip. When Carmen flies over to investigate, I cover it up and tell her she can’t have it. This will almost always inspire her to toss away the death-thumbtack and try to grab the paper clip. She’ll peck at my fingers, wedge her bill between my knuckles to force them apart while squawking angrily, C’mere, c’mere! until she claims her prize (she always mimics when harried). If I pretend I want the paper clip back, she’ll take it away and guard it.

  To keep Carmen safely occupied, I have made a little toy box for her in my studio, as I did for Claire when she was a toddler. Carmen’s is more of a toy bowl, really. It is filled with her favorite things: paper clips, binder clips, hair ties, sticky notes of various sizes and colors, buttons, a crinkly chocolate wrapper, a peanut in its shell, a teabag with string and tag. Every day I renew my vain hope that she will occupy herself with these things while I get some writing done. But the issue with Carmen is that she doesn’t want to just play with these things, she wants to play with them with me. They must sit on my desk, right at my elbow where she can choose one and “kill” it by shaking it back and forth, then thwacking it brutally against the desktop, a behavior she has exhibited since she was very young; she especially likes to attack scraps of paper in this way. I kept this in mind as I studied wild starlings outdoors and saw the behavior duplicated when birds captured insects, especially ones with large wings, like dragonflies or moths. The starlings would brandish their bugs and bash them against the ground until the wings were mostly shaken off, then they would eat the bodies of their now-wingless delicacies. (Carmen has never had the chance to catch anything with elaborate wings, like a moth or a butterfly, but if a little bug flies near her, I am shocked at how lightning fast she can catch it and swallow it down. She is, always, a wild bird.) Once Carmen kills all of her toys, she must show them to me one by one, hopping on my shoulder where she can drop a paper clip down my shirt or leave a sticky note in my hair.

  After an hour or so comes my own favorite Carmen-time. Finding nothing more to play with, having spent long enough reading books over my shoulder and turning pages that I did not want turned, and having finished all of her e-mail correspondence, Carmen settles onto my shoulder, into the crook of my arm, or on my lap against my belly; she rounds her soft breast over her feet, fluffs and then unfluffs her feathers, and becomes perfectly still. Sometimes she will close her eyes; other times she will simply rest, entirely at peace. She might make a contented little sound, one I never hear from her aviary. It is a sigh-chirp, reserved for these moments of quiet snuggling. If I am still, I can feel her swift heartbeat. I will never tire of such moments. Comfort, rest, and unexpected consolation, shared so easily between two beings who grew from such seemingly different limbs of the taxonomic tree.

  I envision moments such as these shared between Wolfgang and Star. I am certain that they were common. It is tempting to assume that in a respectable eighteenth-century home, the bird would sit decoratively in its rococo-style cage, interacting with the household humans only insofar as it took its flageolet lessons from the perch within. But pet birds of the time were allowed out of their cages and made part of daily life, much more so than most modern pet birds. While the typical pet-store birds today are not raised by hand, birds from eighteenth-century European bird sellers were generally stolen from their nests as young (alas, like Carmen) and raised in a home. They were accustomed to human presence, very tame, knew how to fly around a room without bashing into things, and on the whole made good family pets. Then, as now, the level of actual social interaction varied with the species of bird. Finches and canaries are tamable, diverting, and sing prettily but will always be a bit skittish. Species with higher plasticity of behavior—birds like parrots, starlings, and mynahs (the mimics, notably)—are capable of much more.

  As far as we know, Star was the first bird Mozart brought into his married household, but he’d lived with many animals throughout his life. A field guide to Mozart family animals would include his childhood dog, Bimperl, several canaries, and the old horse he brought from Salzburg to Vienna whom he lovingly called the Kleper, or “nag.” The Mozarts responded to their pets with a lively affection. When traveling in Europe, young Mozart would send newsy letters home that culminated with messages for the spaniel: “Cover Bimperl in a thousand million kisses, and pull her fluffy tail for me one hundred times, and fluff her fur until she barks!”

  Star and Gauckerl, like other pets of the era, were at the center of a sea change regarding human attitudes toward nonhuman creatures. It remained a predominant belief throughout the eighteenth century that all organisms were created by God for human pleasure or edification. Birds sing for our delight. Cows dot the landscape to inspire feelings of serenity and, of course, to feed us. Even seemingly insidious creatures demonstrate Divine Wisdom and the love of God for Man: weeds exist to encourage human industry and the movement of our bodies for health; lice incite us to keep clean.

  Before the eighteenth century, human relationships with animals were largely utilitarian—food, transport, work, and scientific research. While the aristocracy might have kept exotic pets, the bourgeoisie in general did not. With René Descartes at the helm of a fashionable rationalist philosophy, only humans were imbued with consciousness; animals were mindless “automatons,” incapable of either thought or suffering. Their cries during scientific study or slaughter were likened by Descartes to the squeaking of a door on its hinges—nothing more. The philosophy of Descartes had become ingrained in the emerging sciences, particularly medicine, where it was used to justify horrific surgical research on live animals.

  It was partly in response to Descartes that Rousseau published his Social Contract in 1762, just twelve years before Mozart brought Star home. Rousseau was born a Calvinist and earnestly converted to Catholicism as a young man, yet he came to believe that the highest insight into religious truth was not revealed but “natural”—found in the pageantry and harmony of nature. Animals became not just workers in the field of God, but windows into the character and workings of God. Rousseau wandered the countryside for peace of mind and heart, and there, amid the simple quietness of plants and the movements of birds, he experienced a “unity of all things” that anticipated the modern ecology movement. His work on animals is an outright rejection of Descartes. Animals may or may not be rational, but they are clearly sentient; they can suffer and so deserve to be treated kindly by humans. Rousseau laid the philosophical groundwork for a continuum between human and
animal consciousness in the Social Contract, writing: “Every animal has ideas, since it has senses; it even combines those ideas in a certain degree; and it is only in degree that man differs, in this respect, from the brute.”

  It was the Rousseauian view of nature that largely inspired the culture of human-animal interaction in Mozart’s time, when it became increasingly popular to keep pets in upper-and middle-class homes—dogs and birds in particular. (As mousers, cats were considered working animals and were most often kept by the lower and farming classes.) Pets were, more than ever before, brought into the house and the round of daily life, and it is this—direct daily contact with animals by ordinary people—that undermined Descartes more than any academic or lofty moral argument. People living with pets could see very clearly that these animals possessed consciousness worthy of human consideration. The pet-keeping of this period is often interpreted as being merely decorative, but Mozart and his starling were actually part of a great philosophical bridge leading from a disastrous lack of ethical standing for animals to the strong evolutionary case for animal consciousness in the nineteenth-century work of Charles Darwin and George Romanes, who in scientific language posited a continuity between humans and animals, both in body and in mind. Their work, along with Rousseau’s Social Contract, led to a movement for the humane treatment of animals and eventually the original Humane Society.

  Still, it would be a mistake to confuse this commonsense recognition of animal consciousness with a modern ecological view of wild animals in nature. Rousseau was an Enlightenment thinker but romantic to the core; for the public, the Rousseauian vision of nature’s goodness, order, and harmony trickled down into an idealized, tamed, garden-like sensibility. Their pet-keeping reflected this.

  Like the effort to make native birdsongs conform to a more human sense of proper musical structure, elaborate cages were patterned after the current taste in architecture. The finer cages were often crafted of mahogany, with silver or brass fittings and lots of tiny alcoves and turrets too small for a bird to enter. They were difficult to clean, decorated with toxic paint, and riddled with exposed nails—created more for ornament than for the health of birds. Tiny, portable cages that allowed singing birds to be carried from room to room were popular, an idyllic eighteenth-century version of the boom box. (I doubt the Mozarts had one of these, as there was plenty of music in the house already.)

  Much of what we know about eighteenth-century bird-keeping centers on a study of portraiture. Professionally commissioned portraits from this period regularly show women and children with pet birds out of their cages. Birds are perched on the shoulders of their keepers, sitting on their fingers, playing with the ribbons on their costumes, eating bits of food from their hands or from the end of a proffered stick (like the Starbucks stirring sticks I used to raise Carmen). All these behaviors imply hours of daily freedom; birds that are primarily caged do not remain tame or tractable enough to interact with their keepers so gently and intimately. Any bird, even when it is raised by hand, will become wary of people when left alone in a cage. In Meredith West’s modern study, the hand-raised birds that were kept on the porch rather than in the house lost their tameness among humans. But in these portraits, we see a teenage girl and a colorful finch perched on the same chair, looking at each other with ease and familiarity; a child and dove each holding one end of a red silk streamer; a woman in a parlor playing her tabletop piano for a chaffinch who stands gazing up from the toe of her silk slipper. (The woman herself looks aloof, bored, desperate for any kind of diversion, as so many intelligent upper-class women were.)

  Elegant Lady with Miniature. An uncaged canary watches as the young lady dubiously assesses her lover’s letter and miniature portrait. (Michel Garnier, ca. 1790)

  For such paintings, all humans appear in their finery—little boys are scrubbed to shining, girls are skirted by froths of billowing pale silk. Men do not typically appear in portraits with birds unless it is a family portrait and the bird is among the children. Societally and artistically, the bird represents a sense of innocent pleasure; hence, it belongs in the realm of children and young women. The portraits convey the atmosphere of a pre-fall Eden, a proper garden of wonders for the young. Mozart, of course, was a man. But just because men are not seen engaging with birds in portraits does not mean that they did not do so in the privacy of their households. And Mozart, we know, was a bird of a different feather.

  There is a reason that I have not been able to find a portrait that includes a starling from this period. Pet birds and family portraits were both symbols of social rank. Exotic parrots and finely trained canaries were expensive and indicative of a certain status. Starlings were common, native birds that any peasant could pluck from a nest. In a shop they cost just a few kreuzer and so were unfit for portraiture. It says a great deal that the status-conscious Mozart chose a starling for his pet—it means that he didn’t want just a bird, he wanted this bird.

  Where does all of this put Star in the Mozarthaus? For Mozart, there could be only one answer: Where the music was. Where Star could be watched, twitted to, flirted with. Where he could join the music, pester the maestro, pluck at the violin strings, pull at the quill pen, tip the ink bottle. The Mozarts, always, made their own music, their own bohemian life. The elegy that Mozart composed for Star when he died shows such a keen understanding of the starling personality, such a personal knowing of his bird, that the two must have shared each other’s company day to day. “He was not naughty, quite / But gay and bright.” The little yellow statue of Star in the Mozarthaus should go in the study.

  Did Star venture beyond the study? It is unlikely. Surely the servants had no time for such nonsense. In the parlor, Star might poop on the fine felt surface of the gaming table or upset the whist game by stealing a card. Guests in the parlor would not have appreciated starling poo in their freshly friseured tresses any more than my modern guests do in their hair. (If Carmen is out of her aviary when friends are around, we offer “poop shirts”—some old things of ours that Carmen can poop on—so no one’s outfit gets mussed.) Besides, starlings get attached to a familiar place. Like Carmen with her aviary and its environs, Star was probably happy staying close to Mozart’s cheerful study.

  I can hardly breathe when I ponder Mozart’s daily schedule and workload. His output was almost inconceivable. In 1784, the year he and Constanze moved to Camesina House, he wrote six piano concertos, one piano quintet, one string quartet, two piano sonatas, two sets of variations for piano, and dozens of shorter compositions. In 1785 he composed three piano concertos, two string quartets, one piano quartet, a sonata and the Fantasia in C Minor for piano, the Maurerische Trauermusik (Masonic Funeral Music), operatic scenes for vocal trio and quartet, and several gorgeous parlor songs, and arranged the Mass in C Minor as part of a cantata.

  We imagine him, like most writers, painters, and other artists, working in undisturbed peace and seclusion, with his dutiful spouse shushing the babes and guarding her genius husband’s privacy. In the Mozart household, nothing could have been further from the truth. Constanze was a beloved partner to Wolfgang, but as Volkmar Braunbehrens writes in his brilliant biography Mozart in Vienna: 1781–1791, she was not “a good little housewife who spent the whole day doing laundry, cooking, and keeping the children away from her husband so he could have the peace to work. The Mozart house was a loud and restless one, but least of all because of the children, who played a minor role; it had more to do with music—pupils, house concerts, and rehearsals—and with Mozart’s own need for constant commotion: conversation, laughter, visitors who were often houseguests.”

  We know that Mozart’s house was full of music. He was running about Vienna, yes, but he was also at home for hours each day, composing, playing, teaching. It is said that when thinking he spoke aloud to himself in operatic recitative. Constanze had a splendid voice and sang as she knit lace, sewed, or chased and dandled the children. In the summer of 1788, Constanze’s brother-in-law Joseph Lange (wh
o had married Aloysia, Constanze’s older sister and the object of Mozart’s early romantic passion) brought a gaggle of theater folk, including two Danish actors, to visit the Mozarts. We have this wonderful diary entry from one of the Danes, a slice of Mozart home life:

  There I had the happiest hour of music that has ever fallen to my lot. This small man and great master twice extemporized on a pedal pianoforte, so wonderfully! so wonderfully! that I quite lost myself. He intertwined the most difficult passages with the most lovely themes. —His wife cut quill-pens for the copyist, a pupil composed, a little boy aged four walked about in the garden and sang recitatives—in short, everything that surrounded this splendid man was musical!

  The diarist was an enamored guest, and Wolfgang surely took a moment to show off, but nearly all reports of daily life at the Mozart compound are similar: musical and domestic chaos, and the composer happy within it. There were the children, upon whom Wolfgang doted, and the dog, and the students. Mozart taught female students in their own homes, where they were chaperoned, as was customary, but male students came to his studio, and particularly gifted young men would stay on for months, perhaps a year, and live as part of the household, treated as family. Mozart not only managed to compose amid all this chaos; by all reports, he preferred it. The background noise and bustle was something to work against. It is said that when Wolfgang was composing music in his mind, his outward actions changed little, but something about his countenance became for a moment a touch distant, as if he were listening to a faraway birdsong, before his quill sped along again. Star would not have been a distraction at all—at least, not an unwelcome one, but rather a strand in the splendid, essential, almost divine chaos.