Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Leopold made just one extraordinary visit to Wolfgang and Constanze after they were married. He arrived in March of 1785 for a ten-week stay, prepared to be appalled at the state of the household and marriage. Instead, he was impressed with Constanze’s economy and enthralled with the liveliness of the home. He wrote to Nannerl, whom he had left alone in Salzburg: “It is impossible to describe the rush and bustle. Since my arrival your brother’s piano has been taken at least a dozen times to the theater or to some other house.” This happened constantly—the fussy maestro preferred his own instrument for performances, and so it was moved every two or three days.

  Earlier that year, Mozart had composed a set of quartets for his friend and mentor Joseph Haydn and was anxious for the maestro’s opinion before he ventured to formally dedicate them. During Leopold Mozart’s stay in the Domgasse apartment, the quartets were performed at a small party for Haydn, with Wolfgang playing viola, and Leopold Mozart himself playing first violin. After, Haydn famously commented to Leopold: “I swear to you before God and as an honest man that your son is the greatest composer I have ever known in person or by name” (and in a jarring departure from the rest of the Mozarthaus museum’s simplicity, these words are painted in slender period calligraphic style on the salon wall). In my imagination, Leopold’s narrow face is almost permanently lined with an anxious semi-scowl, his dark version of the Mona Lisa’s smile. Still, the pleasure he felt at this compliment could not have been hidden.

  The night was a glorious one for Mozart. Haydn loved the quartets, his father was proud, the parlor was filled with glowing candles and the swooshing whisper of brocade. During my visit I walked to the windows of this open sunny room, which overlooked a narrow, cobbled pedestrian alley, sweet buildings, and my favorite little café away from the busy-ness of the Graben, surrounded by pink autumn petunias. I closed my eyes and heard the music.

  If my suspicions are correct, there was another layer to the musical offerings that night, beyond the usual quartet instrumentation. Mozart’s study and, if I am right, Star’s cage were just one room away. An acclaimed neuropsychologist wrote that “only humans have a natural, or innate, inclination to engage with music.” I read this aloud one evening at the dinner table and everyone cracked up. Clearly this scientist has never lived with a starling. When live music is played in our house, Carmen is constitutionally incapable of silence. She jumps and flutters and then settles into singing with full starling exuberance. Whistled cadenzas, warbles, Hi, Carmen! Hi, honey! Wine-stopper sounds, more whistles. Wildness, joyfulness.

  There is plenty of opportunity. Claire is a gifted musician, playing for hours a day on her cello but also on piano, mandolin, and guitar. I play the Celtic harp and a little violin and piano. Tom—well, Tom plays the cowbell. Usually, we just revel in Carmen’s participation, hearing it as an element of the music—par for the course in our slightly eccentric household of writers and players. But it can be a nuisance when Claire is trying to make a cello recording for an audition or give a serious home performance. Sometimes I’ll take Carmen up to my study when Claire needs to make a clean recording, but once we attached a note to a recorded audition for a prestigious festival. Claire had played perfectly and nearly cried when she heard the overlay of Hi, Carmen! Kiss me! on top of her Tchaikovsky. Please excuse the bird sounds. We have a pet starling. Mozart had one too.

  It’s not just Carmen. This is what starlings do—they join the music. What happened the night that Haydn’s quartets were performed? Did the Mozarts toss a blanket over Star’s cage to discourage the loud whistles and warbles that the music surely incited? Did they close the door to dampen Star’s song? Certainly not. Leopold loved birds at least as much as his son did. I would bet a hundred gulden that they all laughed, opened wide the doors between the rooms, and enjoyed another strain of the household orchestra.

  Six

  HOW THE STARLING KNEW

  Though I did not attempt to teach Carmen particular words or phrases while raising her, I did try to teach her the motif from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, the musical phrase that, we know from Mozart’s notebook, Star could sing. I wondered if it might be a tune that starlings in general responded to, and in any case, it would be a wonderful element of the narrative to say that Carmen learned Star’s tune. I imagined the YouTube video that we would produce: Carmen singing alongside images of the maestro, murmurations of starlings flying in the background, and eventually a full orchestra picking up the theme. So even when Carmen was a baby bird tucked into her cottage-cheese tub-nest on my desk, I played the motif from Mozart’s concerto for her on my violin at least thirty times a day; I hummed the tune while tidying my study; I looped an orchestral recording on my iPod and let it run while I was at the grocery store. Carmen was raised on a steady diet of homemade starling mash and Mozart.

  As it turned out, Carmen had no intention of learning the motif. But by the time she was two months old, she did take a keen interest in learning the violin. She is the only creature on earth who has ever seemed to take pleasure in my playing. (Once I was practicing with the window open, and three neighborhood dogs began to howl.) Her favorite place to study violin was from her perch at the tip of my bow. At two months, a full-size bird, she weighed just two ounces. Still, it is difficult to play with a starling on your bow. Now, as an adult, Carmen prefers to perch on the scroll of the violin and gape between the strings; she places her bill between two strings, opens her mandibles wide, and then pulls her bill out, so both strings ring. This seems to delight her. But she will not learn the Mozart motif. Starlings are among the few songbirds who continue to learn new vocalizations year after year, so I am not without hope that she will surprise me one day. It is a sweet phrase, and Star could not have chosen a lovelier tune to share with his new owner.

  I attended the Seattle Symphony’s performance of the Concerto in G recently, with internationally acclaimed virtuoso Imogen Cooper at the piano and conducting the orchestra as she played. She walked through the big doors of the performance hall and onto the stage like an oak draped in red sateen—statuesque, strong, rooted. As this concerto begins, we in the audience scarcely have time to adjust to our surroundings before Mozart tosses us headlong with his music into the full current of human emotional possibility, yet he manages the swift transitions with such beauty that we do not think to resist. Mozart believed, always, in beauty and in harmony and would not sacrifice either, no matter how dark his themes. He wrote this out in a famous 1781 letter to Leopold that is now taken as an articulation of his musical philosophy and a foundational statement of Viennese classicism: “Passions, violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and Music must never offend the ear, even in the most horrendous situations, but must always be pleasing, in other words, always remain Music.”

  The concerto has three movements, the allegro, the andante, and the allegretto. In the first, the allegro, Mozart progresses from one musical idea to the next without restraint and with practiced effortlessness. The effect is a nuanced joy that ventures into unexpected keys with such fluency that we almost forget to be unsettled. The woodwinds carry much of the discourse here; we modern audiences might not even notice it, but in Mozart’s time a strong woodwind voice was unusual. After all the sweet activity of the allegro, the dark serenity of the andante falls over the audience like a shroud. The opening is an ethereal string theme, which after about twenty seconds abruptly stops. Just stops. The oboe and bassoon take up the silence and sing behind a floating solo flute. Finally, the piano enters, entirely alone. The dramatic pauses continue, reminding us constantly that we are in the hands of a master operatic composer—operatic drama will emerge increasingly from here on in Mozart’s concertos and symphonies. Now it is the piano that sings this concerto’s wordless aria. There are harmonic surprises and further forays into unusual keys. I cannot close my eyes, because I don’t want to miss the oak-trunk movements of Imogen Cooper at her instrument, conducting with limited, but dramatic, mov
ements of her body, arm-branches, and eyebrows. But even with my eyes open, I feel I am surrounded by forest imagery—earth, mist, a veiled, enchanted-but-dark place. And the flute, to me, is Pan’s.

  There is no rest. The allegretto leaps immediately into the relief of G major and the first notes of the starling’s motif. The shadows disperse. Instead of the expected rondo, Mozart dispatches five variations on the theme and then, in the finale, runs away with it in a prodigal fantasia in which Star’s motif surfaces over and over against the riverine flow of the piano cadenzas.

  They say that birds prefer Mozart above other composers, and perhaps this is true. But not Carmen. She prefers Bach and bluegrass. Based on the exuberance of her reactions, she even has a favorite band—Greensky Bluegrass. When this beautiful concerto of Mozart’s is playing, she will sit impassively on my shoulder, almost yawning. But when the final movement begins, she is excited. She jumps down to my hand where she can look me in the eye. Hi, Carmen! Hi, honey! she calls before breaking into her own shrill starling aria. There is something here for her. There is something here for everyone. In the program notes to the Seattle performance, the commentator suggests that the andante movement’s “nod toward melancholy is swept away by the next animated variation.” But in my hearing, this is not true. The melancholia remains, perhaps more romantic than existential, but lingering within our listening experience. The exuberance of the finale contains the darkness, enfolds it, shelters it, redeems it. But does not forget it.

  Like most of Mozart’s music, this concerto is written on two levels—one for the simple enjoyment of the musically uneducated ear, and one for the musical adept. Mozart could not have maintained his public popularity and sustained his own genius-level interest in any other way. In a famous anecdote, Emperor Joseph was present for the first performance of the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio and remarked afterward to the composer, “Too beautiful for our ears and an extraordinary number of notes, dear Mozart,” who was said to have replied, “Just as many, Your Majesty, as necessary.” The exchange as imagined by Peter Shaffer for the play and movie Amadeus is more caustic and has become something of an anthem to the creative spirit:

  JOSEPH: There you are. It’s clear. It’s German. It’s quality work. There are simply too many notes. Do you see?

  MOZART: There are just as many notes, Majesty, neither more nor less, as are required.

  I agree with many scholars’ skepticism over the authenticity of the exchange, but it does capture an honest conflict for Mozart, a young composer whose head was nearly exploding with new musical ideas, a man who required imperial support but whose audiences, both public and sovereign, were not quite ready for the full force of his originality. Biographer Maynard Solomon notes that while the story may not be reliable in its fine points, it is nevertheless true that in the next round of imperial sponsorship for German-language opera, Mozart was not employed to write anything except a minor comedic singspiel.

  By now, the fact of the starling’s ability to mimic a simple musical phrase should be no surprise. But rumors over how the bird learned Mozart’s refrain have run wild. In short commentaries and recording liners and program notes for this concerto, I have read emphatic but unsupported statements that the starling taught the motif to Mozart. That Mozart taught it to the starling. That Mozart heard the starling whistle a folk song that sounded like his motif. And, most astonishing, that “Mozart trained a pet Starling to whistle, in its entirety, all of one movement of his G major piano concerto, though the bird consistently sang two notes a bit flat.” Not only is the “all of one movement” claim a shocking hyperbole—even for a starling—but we know from the notations in Mozart’s book that Star sang one note sharp, not two notes flat. What respectable starling would be caught dead singing flat?

  The whimsical suggestion that Star taught the motif to Mozart—that he sang a song of his own adapted by Mozart for the concerto—appears in print with some frequency. Such claims are proffered by folk who are speculating with just a tidbit of information. Though Mozart will, as we’ll see, incorporate starling-esque cadences and personality traits inspired by Star into later work, this concerto was completed more than a month before Mozart brought his bird home, and so for this composition such a proposal remains nearly impossible. There is, however, a sweet children’s book that fictionalizes the theory delightfully. In Mozart Finds a Melody, by Stephen Costanza, Mozart is facing a deadline and is plagued by a bad case of writer’s block:

  For the first time in Wolfgang’s life, the famous composer was at a loss for a tune. He tried every trick to get his imagination going. He sang standing on his head. He played his violin in the bathtub. He even threw darts at the blank music paper. Alas, nothing worked.

  The bird sings notes that start to coalesce into a theme that Mozart can use, but just as Mozart is ready to put quill to paper, the bird flies out the window. The distraught composer must find the bird in order to finish his tune. The role of starling as muse is authentic, but the idea that the bird taught this tune to Mozart is far-fetched.

  But what is true? How and when did Star learn Mozart’s motif? There are really only two overarching possibilities: either Star learned the motif before Wolfgang purchased him at the shop, as in my introductory tale, or he learned the song after the purchase, while living with the Mozart family. There are problems with both. If Star could sing the motif before (or at the time) that Mozart bought him, then how had he learned it? If Star learned the motif later, then how could Mozart have recorded the tune in his notebook at the time he bought the bird?

  The answer to this question was a kind of holy grail to me while I traveled in Vienna and Salzburg. I believed that by the time I finished my researches there, examined documents, wandered Mozart’s homes, talked with experts, and let daydreams trail through my brain under the influence of the Austrian landscape, I would, somehow, have uncovered the solution to this lovely musico-ornithological mystery. It didn’t matter, I knew, in the scheme of things. Why, really, when I know the essentials of the story, should I care about the arcana?

  I can answer only in the way thousands of seekers over hundreds of years have answered their own version of such a question: I care with the brightened curiosity of one who loves a subject for no rational reason, but who loves it nonetheless, and prodigally. This is the ardor of the academic Austenologist who believes that if she looks beneath the floorboards of the right dusty attic, she will find the diary entry explaining why Jane Austen rejected her one marriage proposal the day after she’d accepted it; of the birder in Costa Rica tiptoeing through trails of biting ants and fer-de-lance serpents in hopes of glimpsing a rare hummingbird that no one has seen for fifteen years. I could list such loves forever, the sort that visit our imaginations on the cusp of the impossible but that we cannot erase from our minds. We follow the trail with whatever bread crumbs we can gather, with hope, with love, with an almost magical combination of urgency and patience. There were just enough crumbs in the Mozart story that I felt confident that, with enough sleuthing, the details of just how the Mozart-and-Star story unfolded would fill my grail chalice. Naturally, that is not at all what happened.

  As far as objective facts go, in all of my Austrian snooping, I uncovered little more than the broad strokes I already knew. Mozart’s own catalog of work tells us that the concerto was completed on April 12, 1784. It has long been believed by musical historians that the piece was meant to be a strict secret, not performed publicly until mid-June of that year, when Mozart conducted it with a small chamber ensemble that included Barbara Ployer—his gifted young student for whom the concerto was composed—at the piano. This recital took place before a small, elite audience at the von Ployers’ country residence, where the great doors might have been opened to the garden of chestnut trees, allowing the cool evening breezes to lull the attendees into an even deeper romantic state than the music would normally induce.

  We know from Mozart’s expense notebook that Star was purchased on M
ay 27 and that he could sing the line from the Piano Concerto in G. It was Mozart’s habit for a time to record all his expenditures in this small booklet. The purchase just prior to the starling reads, Two lilies of the valley, 1 kreuzer, making Mozart, with his acquisitions of flowers and birds, appear to be even more romantic than he actually was. Previous and future purchases are more prosaic and include staff paper, ink, books. The notebook was used as a primary reference in an early 1798 biography of Mozart by Franz Niemetschek, for which Constanze provided source material. More thorough references to the notebook, with facsimiles of some pages, including the ones with the starling references, appear in a thematic catalog of Mozart’s ephemera gathered in 1828. In the commentary for this facsimile, it is mentioned that the musical notation recording the starling’s song was written zugleich folgende, or “immediately following,” the record of the bird’s purchase, implying that he recorded the starling singing at the same time that he bought it.

  If not for the notebook, it would be easiest to argue that Star learned the motif once he was home with the Mozarts. This is the way of starlings. They involve themselves in the daily sounds of their flock—whether that flock is made up of birds, humans, or violins. Like any other starling worth its feathers, Star would simply have absorbed and mimicked favored sounds from his setting—and what a setting he had! In this scenario, Star simply picked up the tune as it was practiced or whistled by Wolfgang in his study. And what bird (besides my contrary Carmen) wouldn’t love to sing the merry rondo of Mozart’s seventeenth concerto? It is a sweet, self-contained, chirpy little refrain—perfect for a starling.