Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Such pronouncements suggest that the entire piece is a bizarre horror when in actuality there is much to enjoy—the composition on the whole is lighthearted and there are moments of bright energy and sweetness, especially the triplet-driven opening of the allegro, a section that makes me want to get up and twirl. If there seems to be a loss of control, as suggested by the Deutsche Grammophon author, I would argue it is a tightly controlled appearance of disorganization, which a true amateur could never pull off. Even so, Mozart didn’t mean for the composition to represent his serious side. It was a playful piece with a riddle at its center: Where did this wild voice come from?

  The description of this music should sound familiar. I have experimented with playing the most objectionable cadenzas from A Musical Joke alongside the recorded vocalizations of a starling who has lost himself in one of his long, rambling utterances and with Carmen’s own singing. The melodies, or “unmelodies,” of the quintet excerpts and the starling songs can be perfectly overlaid. I am not the first to notice the resemblance. When Meredith West and her husband, Andrew King, were pondering the subject of Mozart’s starling while raising starlings of their own for research, the comparison became irresistible. The pair were students of animal behavior, not musicologists or Mozart historians, and with their fresh ears, they could detect something that centuries of musical commentary had overlooked. A Musical Joke, the researchers asserted in 1990, bears “the vocal autograph of the starling.” They noted the fractured phrases, the tendency of starlings to respond to songs they have heard by singing them back off-key, to repeat parts that seem to have gone on long enough, and to delete parts that seem essential to the human ear. (One of the birds in West’s study loved to mimic part of a song it heard in the household: Way down upon the Swa—! That was it. No matter how many times the starling heard the song, nothing could convince it to add-nee River.) On top of all this, starlings flexibly and unpredictably combine and recombine phrases, just as Mozart does in this piece, while tossing in starling-esque whistles and squeals. As Meredith West wrote in response to the Deutsche Grammophon commentator:

  “The illogical piecing together”—in keeping with the starlings’ intertwining of whistled tunes. The “awkwardness” could be due to the starlings’ tendencies to whistle off-key or to fracture musical phrases at unexpected points. The presence of drawn-out, wandering phrases of uncertain structure is characteristic of starling soliloquies. Finally, the abrupt end, as if the instruments had simply ceased to work, has the signature of starlings written all over it.

  Revered ornithologist Luis Baptista of the California Academy of Sciences ordained the view. The piece that flummoxed musicologists, claimed Baptista, certainly does mimic the starling’s innate vocal tendencies. He adds to the conversation by noting that the final cadence of the Joke is composed in a two-voice counterpoint—a Bach-ian element, but also a birdlike one. The structure of the syrinx (the avian version of the larynx) allows many songbirds, including starlings, to sing two and sometimes even more notes or tones at the same time (a technique perfected in the flute songs of thrushes). Baptista suggests that the counterpoint is another proof of starling influence, and I believe him. But I believe, too, that this cadence also represents the playfully joined voices of composer and bird.

  As further substantiation of Star’s influence on the sextet, we now know that A Musical Joke was composed in bits and pieces during the three-year period that Mozart lived with Star, and it was completed soon after the starling’s death. Thus, the piece morphs from musical error into musical eulogy—Mozart’s idiosyncratic gift and tribute to the bird whose little life twined so thoroughly with his own. The affinity was an honest one. Bird and composer had much in common. Both maestro and starling shared an astonishing likeness in talents (mimicry, vocal play, musical gymnastics), personality (busy-ness, silliness, flirtatiousness, tomfoolery), and social priorities (attention-seeking!).

  Like other members of his species, Star was flirtatious and prone to bursting into song, as was Mozart himself, who is said to have wandered eccentrically about, muttering in a musical recitative, a habit both operatic and birdlike. Like Star, Mozart was a gifted mimic. Certainly he could imitate any musical style in his compositions, and regularly did; he was commissioned to create particular styles of work for church or official occasions throughout his career. But he could also, even as a child, vocally imitate any of the prevailing opera seria styles in ranges from tenor to full soprano. When Mozart bragged in a letter to his father, “I can, as you know, pretty much adopt and imitate any form and style of composition,” Leopold replied, “I know your capabilities. You can imitate anything.”

  As a child, Mozart was as wide-eared as a starling, swiftly learning new languages and absorbing musical styles and influences in his travels, and he would forever use modeling, imitation, and parody playfully and gorgeously in his own compositions. Always the impresario, Leopold urged Wolfgang to use this skill to professional advantage, and he did. But Wolfgang also mimicked for fun, enlivening parties with his vocal and physical impressions of friends, other musicians, and even the emperor. He was surely surprised and delighted by the ever-changing, ever-mischievous vocal capacities of his pet, so much like his own. In their shared vocal play, their clever backing-and-forthing of aural possibility, Mozart found the closest thing to an avian kindred spirit that the green earth had to offer. A bird playmate evolved, it seems, just for him.

  The other day, Claire and I were browsing at Pegasus, our wonderful neighborhood used bookstore, she at the Austen/Brontë shelf, I close by in Willa Cather, when I heard her whisper in teenage horror, “Mom, you have bird poop in your hair.” I have lost count of the times she has had to make such proclamations in public, and they never cease to scandalize her. I’ve come to be rather philosophical about it. What can one do? Carmen sits on my head half the day, so naturally she poops there, and guano in the tresses is tricky business. While starling excrement wipes easily from a nonporous surface, the best way to get it out of your hair is to pick the solid bits off with tissue paper and let the rest dry, at which point it can easily be combed out. Usually, though, I forget about it, and it sort of blends in until the next shampoo.

  When I spoke with Tim Gentner about his starling grammar research, the conversation came around to Carmen, and he was intrigued. Though he has worked with hundreds of captive starlings, he has never lived with one flying around his house. The things that usually surprise people about Carmen (that she’s pretty, smart, tame, and can talk) are of course well known to Gentner. So I was amused by his question “Doesn’t she make a mess?” By which he really meant: Isn’t there poop all over your house?

  Well, yes and no. Like all birds that do a lot of flying, starlings poop a lot. It’s adaptive, essential in keeping their weight down for optimal aerodynamics. When a little waste accumulates in the intestines, they poop it right out to stay clean, light, and flight weight. Compare this strategy to a bird like a loon, say, or a cormorant—one that doesn’t fly much but dives for a living and needs to be heavy and un-buoyant. These birds accumulate great stores of waste, which they eventually eliminate in shocking streams that float like rafts on the surface of the water; seeing them, you might think a whale had passed by. Though starlings defecate more frequently, their droppings are low volume. Most of the bird excreta we see on urban and suburban sidewalks come from birds like crows and pigeons—bigger birds with droppings that are substantial enough to stick around for a few hours or a day. But starlings and most other urban songbirds are smaller-bodied. Their poops blend in with the grass and the dirt, quickly wash away in a rain sprinkle, or are otherwise absorbed into the substrate.*

  The issue is more problematic for an indoor bird. Though I allow Carmen to fly freely as much as possible, she still spends a lot of time in her aviary and is there overnight, so that is where most of her droppings accumulate. I make sure that the newspapers lining the floor are changed every day and that her perches are scrubbed. As far as
the rest of the house goes, recall that starlings are remarkably social. Carmen does not care to be flapping about the house by herself, exploring. She wants to be with us, on us. And since I am Carmen’s primary caregiver, that’s where her poop goes. On me. Or at least within arm’s reach. I always have a square of tissue in hand, ready to wipe up any fresh pooplets that drop onto my computer screen or the floor or the book I am reading. I have an old shirt, now dubbed the poop shirt, which I pull over the top of whatever I’m wearing when I let Carmen out of her aviary. It’s an imperfect system. I often forget to don the poop shirt, and when I take off my clothes to change into my pajamas at night, I discover that I have been wandering about all day with a healthy dollop of Carmen’s doo-doo on the back of my sweater.

  Friends or historians sometimes bring up the fact of random poop as an argument against my firm belief that Star was let out to fly freely in Mozart’s study. Surely this would not have been allowed in a decorous eighteenth-century home, even one as eccentric as the Mozarts’? But a little starling poop here and there would not have fazed Mozart or his family in the least. Mozart was happily conversant with digestive matters. When Peter Hall, director of the play Amadeus, spoke with Margaret Thatcher after a performance, he was bemused to discover that she was horrified by the maestro’s vulgarity of manner as it was portrayed in this production. Evidently, the prime minister was not known as a patron of the dramatic arts; the premiere of Amadeus was the first time she had ventured to the theater in some fifteen years, and this because she was a fan not of theater, but of Mozart. Hall wrote of Thatcher’s response to the performance in the introduction to a later edition of Peter Shaffer’s play: “She was not pleased. In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words.” Thatcher proclaimed it inconceivable that the man who wrote such “exquisite and elegant music” could be so foulmouthed. But while Amadeus does take many historical liberties, this is not one of them. Hall politely attempted to bring Mrs. Thatcher up to speed on the contents of Mozart’s letters but was told, “I don’t think you heard what I said. He couldn’t have been like that.” And Hall had no choice but to concede: “The Prime Minister insisted that I was wrong, so wrong I was.”

  Mozart reveled in toilet humor, a predilection he came by honestly; potty talk was a regular part of his upbringing. Naturally there was the usual playful poo-jesting between brother and sister, both at home and in letters while they were apart, but such humor continued long beyond childhood. Mozart’s scatological jokes are often tossed off as part and parcel of the poor taste of adolescence, his overall immaturity, or perhaps even a kind of pathology. But excrement was a standard subject of conversation and joking between the seemingly straitlaced Leopold and the proper Anna Maria as well. When Wolfgang and his mother left for their European tour in 1777 (none of the family dreaming that Anna Maria would die in Paris), she assured her fretting husband in a letter along the way, “Don’t worry, darling, everything will come right in the end. I wish you good night, my dear, but first, shit in your bed and make it burst.” (Emphasis mine.) This wording appears also in letters from the ostensibly prudish Leopold to his wife and son, and from Wolfgang to his first lover, cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart (the Bäsle, or “little cousin,” as Wolfgang called her), whom he visited in Augsburg. As far as I have been able to determine, this is not a historical idiom but simply a lighthearted, and rather weird, family meme.

  In a letter to the Bäsle, Wolfgang wrote, after a parade of other silliness, “Oui, oui, by love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin.” And further along: “I now wish you a good night, shit in your bed with all your might, sleep with peace on your mind, and try to kiss your own behind.” And after pages of linguistic feats displaying a wild wit and questionable taste, the young maestro turned to fart jokes.

  Now I must relate to you a sad story that happened just this minute. As I’m in the middle of my best writing, I hear a noise in the street. I stop writing—get up, go to the window—and—the noise is gone—I sit down again, start writing once more—I have barely written 10 words when I hear the noise again—I rise—but as I rise, I can still hear something but very faint—it smells like something burning—wherever I go it stinks, when I look out the window, the smell goes away, when I turn my head back to the room, the smell comes back—finally My Mama says to me: I bet you let one go?—I don’t think so, Mama. Yes, yes, I’m quite certain. I put it to the test, stick my finger in my ass, then put it to my nose, and—Ecce Provatum est!* Mama was right! Now farewell, I kiss you 10000 times.

  When Constanze shared the Bäsle letters with Franz Niemetschek for his early biography, she wrote an accompanying note: “Although in dubious taste, the letters to his cousin are full of wit and deserve mentioning, although they cannot of course be published in their entirety.”

  I decidedly disagree with Hall’s conclusion in his introduction to Shaffer’s play that Mozart had an “infantile sense of humor” and “protected himself from maturity by indulging his childishness.” Mozart’s scatological bent is part of a wide-ranging wordplay that was bawdy and might have been immature in some ways, but in my view, the response of the entire Mozart family to an essential element of the human condition shows acceptance, wit, and a sense of humor that is more indicative of playful intelligence than actual puerility.

  Subscribers to the Sublime Mozart myth are naturally horrified, but in truth things may not be as bad as they seem. The Mozarts did not live in a whitewashed modern society—there was no water in the homes, no pipe systems, however rudimentary, no toilets of any kind. The facts of the body were close to the surface of everyday life. Nor was eighteenth-century Salzburg the laced-up theater of manners of the coming Victorian era; there was more room for casual jocularity.

  And yet, even with such allowances, was the Mozart family’s toilet humor—what would you say—normal? Probably not entirely. This talk is a bit coarse by any social standard, and for this reason, it offers a wonderful insight into the family. For two hundred years, we have unquestioningly swallowed the proffered image of Leopold as an uptight patriarch at the helm of a rigidly controlled family, and yet in the Mozarts’ letters and ephemera and portraits, another image emerges. Here was a family that was intelligent and hardworking and concerned with status and success, yes, but also one that was comfortable together, that was jolly, silly, fun, and a bit raucous. All of us grew up visiting the houses of our friends and their parents, where we learned that there were families that made fart jokes and families that did not. The Mozarts were the sort that did.

  And so, for Mozart, the finger-smeller, the shit-burster, surely the tiny droppings that issued from Star, quickly wiped up, would have been nothing at all. Mozart composed on good paper, and it would have been easier to clean Star’s droppings from his compositions in progress than it is for me to wipe them from my modern, poor-quality copy paper. Fair copies of manuscripts would have been kept away from the bird, just as I keep my beloved old leather diary, my complete Emily Dickinson, and other treasures out of arm’s reach when Carmen is in my study (though they can stay out on the shelves and do not have to be put away completely—as I say, she doesn’t venture much from my shoulder). Mozart’s ink bottle would have had to be minded, but overall I expect Mozart had it easier with his bird than I do with mine. I am just waiting for my MacBook Pro to fizzle and short from fresh, liquidy Carmen poo sliding between the keys. When I took it into the shop because it was overheating and the fan was making a thumpa-thumpa-thumpa sound, the tech took it apart and showed me the “food” that was stuck in the mechanism. “Um, yeah,” I confessed, “that’s actually starling poop.” With no apparent sense of humor at all, he brushed the fan clean and sold me a rubber keyboard cover.

  Mozart’s wordplay was not limited to bodily functions. In the above-quoted letter to the Bäsle, Wolfgang takes a flight of astonishing epistolary fancy. The whole lette
r becomes a Spiel, a play, a playground. It does convey the kinds of thoughts and details of daily life typically found in a missive between dear young friends or lovers, but for the most part, it is a tumble of internal rhyming, verbal mirroring, echoes, synonyms, and puns that defy translation. It is nonsensical, but calculated nonsense, a sort of Alice in Wonderland letter, never mere blather, but a work of stunning, charming, goofy intelligence. From the greeting (“Dearest cozz bozz”), to the sign-off (his usual “I kiss you 10000 times,” as he concluded almost every letter he ever wrote to his loved ones, though the number was sometimes one thousand or one hundred thousand or even a million), to the signature (“Old young Sauschwanz, Wolfgang Amadé Rosenkranz”*), there is never a dull moment in this long letter. “I have received reprieved your highly esteemed writing biting, and I have noted doted that my uncle gafuncle, my aunt slant, and you too are all well mell. We too, thank god, are in good fettle kettle. Today I got the letter setter from my Papa Haha safely into my paws claws.”

  Wolfgang makes fun of the Bäsle’s declaration of affection in her recent letter: “You let it out, you expose yourself, you let yourself be heard, you give me notice, you declare yourself, you indicate to me, you bring me the news, you announce onto me, you state in broad daylight, you demand, you desire, you wish, you want, you like, you command that I, too, should send you my Portrait.” But then he gives in with flirtatious nonchalance. “Eh bien, I shall mail fail it for sure.”

  And while Mozart was at his freest in this note to his beloved cousin-lover, there is no shortage of linguistic acrobatics in the rest of his correspondence, and throughout his life. He slips so swiftly and agilely from his native German to riffs in English, Italian, French, and Latin, and tosses in his rhymes and puns so effortlessly that one could almost miss the fact that anything beyond the usual is going on. His most regular correspondent was his father, Leopold, who would worry and scold and demand news if he did not hear from Wolfgang frequently. Every letter, always, began with a rhyme, “Mon très cher père,” and was signed with “I kiss your hands 1000 times”. He wrote to Nannerl on the occasion of her marriage in 1784 (just a few months after Mozart moved with his family and starling to the Domgasse apartment): “Ma très chère soeur! Good gracious! It’s high time for me to write to you if I want my letter to still reach you as a virgin! A few days later and—it’s gone!” He sends congratulations and pleasantries and travel plans and concludes with explicit marital advice (which takes a feminist turn) in rhyming, rambling, iambic pentameter: