Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  So, if your husband shows you cool reserve,

  Which you feel you do not deserve,

  But he, with knotted brow, thinks he’s right:

  Just tell yourself, well it’s his way,

  And say: yes, Master, thy will be done by day

  But my will shall be done at night.*

  In February of 1786, Wolfgang attended a masked ball disguised as an Indian philosopher. He handed out pamphlets filled with clever riddles he had written himself, styled after the works of Iranian philosopher Zoroaster (the model for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and also probably for Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte). Wolfgang sent a copy to his father, and you can almost hear Leopold giggling with approval when he sent it along to Nannerl at her home in St. Gilgen: “The enclosure I’m sending you came from your brother. I solved the first 7 riddles right away just by reading them but the 8th is hard. These fragments are good and true. I suppose they are for moral edification… Please let me have the pamphlet back.”**

  Beyond all the chattering and wordplay, there is one similarity between Mozart and starlings that I would never have guessed. It is known that Mozart enjoyed drinking and was prone to tipsiness at parties. I cannot speak for Star, but wine is Carmen’s favorite thing in her known world. She’ll steal a sip any chance she can get, and we’ve discovered that she can even tell a wineglass from other vessels. If we line up a series of empty glasses on the counter—juice glass, water goblet, wineglass—she will fly straight to the wineglass and poke her bill down to the very bottom, seeking her sweet elixir and spreading her wings to keep her balance. If the cupboard is open for even a second, she zips straight to the wineglass shelf and knocks the flute nearest the edge to its death on the slate floor. Whenever we need to catch her to clip her toenails or accomplish some other starling-maintenance task, we just pour a little wine in the bottom of a glass and grab her when she is bill-down and tail-up. It’s too easy. And though after such a stunt on our part, she will attempt to control herself and avoid wineglasses for a couple of days, in the long run it is too much for her. Her alcoholic tendencies overwhelm her suspicions regarding our motives. Occasionally I relent and share a little Cabernet from my own glass (just a bit—it’s not good for her, and the last thing I need is a drunken starling flopping about). I love my vision of Mozart doing the same with Star.

  Way back when I began exploring this story, I had no doubt that Mozart and his starling pet would find common ground in their adventurous vocalizing and musicality. But the more I have discovered of Mozart’s personality and the more I learn about starlings by living with Carmen, the more I find the similarities between Mozart and Star to be more extreme than I’d ever dreamed: the unusual cleverness, the playful disobedience, the propensity for almost ceaseless chatter. Both were fluttering and curious and disorderly. Both were incapable of being still and quiet in a world so full of sound and happenings and beauty. Both shared the impulse to make wild, original, constant music.*

  Beyond A Musical Joke, no one has suggested further direct connections between Mozart’s starling and a particular piece of music. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. To the alert listener, I believe the lasting influence of Star on Mozart’s work is everywhere in evidence. An infinity of birdlike phrases visit his later work. In arias composed for some of Mozart’s rascally opera heroes, there are bouts of starling-esque mischief. And I do not think it is a simple coincidence that, after Star’s death, a character appears in the Mozart canon that charmingly embodies all the shared personality quirks of both maestro and bird.

  Mozart composed much of his opera Die Zauberflöte, or The Magic Flute, in a tiny cottage set in the rose garden of Salzburg’s Mirabell Palace, windows open to the sounds of birds and the cycles of nature that surface in the opera. This is the same garden where the von Trapp children twirled in the film The Sound of Music, wearing their curtain clothes and singing “Do Re Mi.” The cottage still stands, but I was distressed to find it closed and padlocked for restoration when I was in Salzburg. I was still able to tiptoe around the cottage edges. After doing a little twirl of my own among the roses, I sat quietly and listened to the garden birds. These are the same species that Mozart heard as he composed (European robin, long-tailed tit, chaffinch, blackbird). I couldn’t help whispering to them: “The souls of your ancestors still fly in the arias of The Magic Flute.”

  Die Zauberflöte’s ponderous libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, with its Masonic overtones and dragging plot, is saved by two things: some of the most soaring operatic arias ever composed, and the comic presence of the character Papageno. Papageno appears in costume, a flurry of feathers—he is a bird catcher by trade, but in person more of an actual bird. In the opening scene, the opera’s purported hero Tamino faints after being chased by a giant serpent. He is saved by the Queen of the Night’s maidens, but when he awakens, only Papageno is there. “What are you?” Tamino wonders, noting Papageno’s feathery garb and flittish demeanor. “Me?” Papageno is incredulous. “I’m a human being, like you,” he replies with a sidelong glance that leaves us all in doubt. When Tamino credits Papageno for his rescue, the bird catcher doesn’t bother to correct him. The maidens return and punish Papageno for this falsehood by putting a padlock on his mouth. The worst of penances! Throughout the opera, there is a running gag that Papageno cannot keep from “chattering.” The character of Papageno is social, charming, busy, strange, feathery, musically adept, unpredictable, troublesome yet delightful—it is not difficult to see where the inspiration for Papageno arose in Mozart’s life. Papageno leaps about, unsure and aflutter, meaning well but getting into all manner of mischief. He is the Coyote-Trickster, the Shakespearean fool, his buffoonery masking his intelligence and capability. Everyone is in raptures over the supposed bravery of handsome Prince Tamino, but it is Papageno, not Tamino, who twice saves the heroine Pamina from being raped, and it is Papageno who finds the voice to join her in a powerful duet that sings love into existence.

  The librettist Emanuel Schikaneder was a bit of a character. He had run a traveling theater and was himself a motley mix of impresario, playwright, player, and roustabout. In 1791 he settled in Vienna to run the Theater auf der Wieden, and here he renewed his long friendship with Mozart. It was Schikaneder’s idea for them to collaborate on this new singspiel (or play with music—there are more speaking parts in Die Zauberflöte than in strict operas, where all speaking parts are sung in recitative). The librettist had a rich baritone and cast himself to play Papageno in the initial production. By all accounts, Schikaneder had a lively stage presence and doubtless made a wonderful bird catcher. Mozart kept the arias simple enough for Schikaneder’s range, which was not as extensive as a professional opera singer’s, but Papageno’s melodies are so lovely, the sentiments so human and true, and the baritone voice so inherently gorgeous that listeners find nothing wanting.

  Papageno is best loved for two arias: the first solo in which he announces himself as a bird catcher and the later ecstatic love duet with his mate, the equally feathery Papagena, during which the pair plan their future flock of little Papagenos and -genas. Both melodies are light, bouncy, silly, and enchanting, and along with the Queen of the Night’s tormented rant, with its famous F above high C, these tunes from Papageno are the opera’s zenith. Some musicologists have proposed that in these arias, Mozart is mocking the insipidity of the Viennese musical establishment. Or maybe they are meant to ridicule the compositions of Antonio Salieri, the lesser but at the time more socially established and respected composer. Or perhaps the figure of Papageno represents Salieri himself, painted as a halfwit. (The portrayal of Salieri in Amadeus is entertaining but fictitious—he did not poison Mozart.) I have made an effort to give credence to such theories, but in all honesty, it is difficult to believe that anyone who knows anything of Mozart and has truly experienced Die Zauberflöte could come to such conclusions. Within The Magic Flute, one message rises above all the others: Mozart loves Papageno. In one of the early performances, he
even surprised Schikaneder by appearing offstage to play the sound of Papageno’s glockenspiel himself!

  Librettist Emanuel Schikaneder as Papageno. (Engraving by Ignaz Alberti, 1791)

  Renowned Seattle Opera director Speight Jenkins (now emeritus) wrote an essay for the program of a 2011 production of The Magic Flute titled “Papageno’s Magical Humanity,” in which he claims that Papageno is the character in this opera with whom the audience can most immediately connect: “He wants a good life, enough food to eat, and above all a good wife. Mozart, from what we know of him, had the same feelings: He loved his wife, Constanze, and perhaps his most obvious connection in the libretto to his own feeling is Papageno’s wanting Papagena to be his Herzensweibchen (wife of my heart), which was Mozart’s pet name for Constanze.” Mr. Jenkins has directed numerous productions of The Magic Flute and attended countless performances of the opera all over the world. When I asked him over a cup of tea at a Seattle coffee shop recently whether Papageno might represent some kind of derogatory comment by Mozart on the music of his day, Jenkins laughed. “Papageno is Mozart’s Everyman,” he responded. Then he paused and looked at me straight before saying, “Papageno is Mozart.”

  There are many persistent but untrue myths about Mozart—that he was a “man-child,” always infantile; that he was broke his whole life; that he was buried in a pauper’s grave. One of the most enduring is the notion, so commonly repeated in the Mozart scholarship, that he was the “most urban of composers,” that he was at home only in the city and altogether isolated from the natural world in his life and his work. The misconception may be traceable to a work by Alfred Einstein (no verifiable relation to Albert), the music historian best known for completing the first thorough edit of Mozart’s musical catalog (the Köchel catalog, still in use, which lists the works roughly in order of completion, thus the K. followed by a number that appears on each of Mozart’s compositions). In his 1945 book Mozart: His Character, His Work, Einstein proclaimed that the composer had no sympathy for nature. The book was read by an elite audience in its time but would likely be nothing more than an obscure reference today if not for the fact that Thomas Mann, in the throes of his final illness, chose Einstein’s volume as his deathbed reading. In a 1955 letter to his son Michael, the penultimate letter of his life, Mann wrote that he could sit up listening to music for perhaps an hour a day, but even this effort taxed his nerves. He would rather read Einstein’s book. He swallowed Einstein whole and immortalized his untenable ideas with some of the last words that issued from his own pen:

  What especially interests me is that Mozart has no sense for nature at all, nor for architecture, or Sehenswürdigkeiten in general, but found stimulation only in music itself, and, so to speak, made music out of music, a kind of artistic inbreeding and filtered production—very curious.

  The idea that Mozart’s music is somehow sourced in music itself is philosophically intriguing, and there is no way to know how his genius unfolded in the mysterious process of composition, for which Wolfgang possessed an innate facility. But to make the leap from such musing to the notion that Mozart had “no sense for nature” is simply unsupportable.

  Mozart did love the bustle of the city, and he was concerned about the social matters that came to the fore there—wealth, appearance, and especially acclaim. But even a cursory reading of Mozart’s letters and knowledge of his daily activities show that he loved the natural world and turned to wild things for profound inspiration. Like Goethe, he was interested in recent scientific discoveries, and he paid attention to animals, weather, and the workings of the natural world. He accumulated a small gallery of fine bird prints, part of which was recently gathered for a temporary display at Mozarthaus, and his collection grew to include detailed plant drawings. He loved to be out of the city, to picnic with Constanze in wooded places, to wander at length with her in the Prater, the tree-lined, bird-filled park at the edge of Vienna. “I just can’t make up my mind to go back to the city so early,” he wrote to Leopold after a day out with his “pregnant little wife.” And upon seeing the cottage in the Vienna woods where he was to be put up for a few days while visiting the chancellor, he exclaimed to his father, “The little house is not much, but the surroundings!—the woods—where he had a grotto built that looks as if it had been done by Nature herself—all of it is so Magnificent and so agreeable.” Mozart did not conspicuously gush about his feeling for nature as the Romantics would, but his response was honest and heartfelt. He loved birds, loved animals, loved to ride his horse, loved to walk at the edge of the woods. All of this is expressed with joy in his letters and in his music.

  Poet Gary Snyder wrote that wildness is “a quality of one’s own consciousness,” an elemental characteristic that ran deep in Mozart—he had a way of being, a habit of imagination that belonged in the realm of wildness and nature, regardless of where he lived. It is a quality that, at some level, we all share.

  Carmen’s domestic life is a trade-off. She doesn’t have the freedom of a wild bird, but she doesn’t have the perils of wild life to contend with either: exposure to extreme weather; the vagaries of food availability; competition with other starlings; parasites and diseases that social birds share; predators. And there are other perks to Carmen’s life in our household. She is fed homegrown arugula by hand and has eggs hard-boiled just for her. She enjoys in-house cello concerts. She has a laptop and gets to watch Seinfeld reruns. She has a pet cat.

  With all of this I sometimes forget Carmen’s essential wildness, but then she will do something so completely and weirdly birdish that I am startled into remembering. Her sunbath is one of these things. On sunny days I grab a book and plunk myself in a chair by the bright kitchen window for this lazy-but-necessary starling health maintenance. Carmen perches on my arm or shoulder where the sun’s warmth feels magnified through the window glass. She settles in, spreads her wings, tilts her head, opens her beak, and raises every feather on her body, as if she were a very soft porcupine. Bits of spittle form at the edges of her bill. To all the world, she would look extravagantly poisoned.

  Like many birds, starlings enter a torpor-like state in the sun and spread themselves out so that as much light as possible can reach their epidermis. The many health benefits are believed to include vitamin D absorption, discouraging of parasites, release of oils that protect the skin, and possibly even a mental-health advantage—something akin to the restorative calm we humans feel when we lie on the beach or meditate.

  Sunning birds look like dying zombies. Their pupils dilate, and they flop sideways on the ground. I cannot count how many times people have called me to describe a supposedly sick bird in their yard in just this pose. I’ve made sure that while Carmen always has some shade in her aviary, she also has a couple of places that get direct sunlight at certain times of day so she can sun herself when she wants to and needs to. But as per usual, she prefers company, and so she would rather sun on my shoulder or my arm, or on top of my head, just barely balancing on the tips of her outstretched wings. I marvel at the individual perfection of her feathers, all lifted one by one in this singular sunning ritual. And though Carmen sunbathes almost every day, I never stop wondering over the wild strangeness of it.

  Carmen’s water baths take almost as long and are even more trouble for me. I don’t leave a dish of bathwater in her aviary because her splashing would make a mess with the bird waste and the newspapers that line the floor. If I put a bowl in the sink, she will ignore it and stay on my shoulder—she wants me to hold the bowl for her. Baths are good for her, so I give in. Every day I hold her favorite turquoise Fiestaware bowl under the tap and let a thin stream of water fall and collect in the dish. Carmen jumps in and out several times, hopping from my wrist to the bowl, ducking her head and fluffing her wings over and over and splashing water all around the kitchen for as long as ten minutes. If I don’t wear a raincoat, I have to change my soaking-wet clothes after. This might be a bit inconvenient some days, but it’s also fun, and Carmen clearly
loves her bath. After she finishes, she leaps to my shoulder and shakes like a dog, filling my ear with water, then flies straight to her aviary and is not the tiniest bit interested in coming out again for at least a couple of hours—she’s busy preening every single freshly clean feather.*

  Zombie sunbath. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

  Joyful water bath. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

  When Carmen first feathered out, I thought I might have to teach her to take baths—to coax her into the water, maybe drizzle water over her head to inspire the ducking motion I’d seen in wild starlings during their sidewalk puddle baths. After all, I’d had to teach Claire to trust water and to wash her own hair when she was a toddler; perhaps young starlings learned to bathe by watching older starlings. Yet it turns out that the duck-lift-flap-splash motion is in her blood, and almost the second Carmen feathered out, she attempted to bathe in my water glass (while I was trying to drink from it). Like sunning, water baths are entirely innate. But I was soon to discover proof of an even deeper inborn wildness.