Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  The late Welsh poet John O’Donohue spoke of the earthen wisdom possessed by our animal brothers and sisters. “The animals are more ancient than us,” he urges. “They enjoy a seamless presence—a lyrical unity with the earth. Animals live outside in the wind, in the waters, in the mountains, and in the clay. The knowing of the earth is in them.” And by our attunement, by the tilt of our heads, our enlarged listening, we enter this knowing in a state of shared awareness and being that O’Donohue refers to as “interflow.”

  It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or eyes or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined. We create from what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the Rio Abajo Rio, the “river beneath the river.” The song just beneath our typical hearing, the murmuration that calls the tiniest neurons of our brains into flight.

  And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air the beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the elder friend’s fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with the deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear.

  Finale

  THREE FUNERALS AND A FLIGHT OF FANCY

  While writing this book, I felt constantly superstitious about Carmen’s well-being. Whenever an animal has a book written about it, that animal ends up dead. Dewey the Library Cat. Marley the dog. Wesley the owl. Mumble, the owl who liked sitting on Caesar. Mij, the otter in Ring of Bright Water. There was a sweet little book penned in the 1980s called Arnie the Darling Starling; Arnie succumbed to a foot infection in the last chapter. Writing about an animal seems to be the very kiss of death. I worried throughout the project that this chapter would end up being titled “Four Funerals.”

  Carmen did everything she could to assist in the fulfilling of this grim prophecy. I’ve listed many of the common ways for household starlings to die; Carmen constantly thinks up new ones. It seems she tries to find a way to kill herself every single day. Besides getting herself locked in the refrigerator, her many attempts have included:

  —Flying headlong into a closed window, after which she lay motionless on the floor for fifteen minutes while I knelt next to her whispering, “You’re going to be okay, little one.”

  —Ingesting a rubber band that I had to eke out of her esophagus with surgical delicacy so it wouldn’t become tangled in her intestines.

  —Attempting to peck at the nose of Delilah the cat, whom we forgot to lock up before letting Carmen out of the aviary.

  —Climbing into a narrow cellophane bag that she found who knows where, getting her wings pinned, and thrashing helplessly about until discovered, by which time she was gasping for air and the bag was filled with the fog of her breath.

  —Trying to eat something too big to swallow, then almost choking on it; a raisin, an almond, a garbanzo bean, a snap pea. And, once, a whole grape.

  Carmen’s Near-Death Magnum Opus was flying through an open window. Of course we are normally religious about closing all the windows when Carmen is flying loose in the house. But this was a sunny day; Tom was home alone, listening to Bob Marley and dancing joyfully around the kitchen. He forgot all about the open window above the stove, and when he let Carmen out to join him, she flew straight through it and into the backyard. Tom ran out the door just in time to see her wing around the house and, it seemed, into the open world. He wandered the streets, calling her most familiar words—“Hi, Carmen! C’mere!” But nothing, nothing, nothing. By the time I arrived home, an hour later, Tom was in a panic, huddled in the backyard with his head in his hands. “I lost Carmen,” he told me, near tears. Meanwhile, a gaggle of teenage girls was arriving to meet Claire for a pre-high-school-dance beautifying party. Then the pizza guy showed up and wanted money. All was utter mayhem.

  The prognosis for starlings who have been raised indoors and escape into the world is not optimistic. They are not experienced at feeding themselves; they don’t know how to behave in starling society, and so do not have the protection of a flock; they think cats are their friends. Lost starlings have not learned the geography of their neighborhoods as they would had they been raised among flying outdoor birds, so if they go exploring, they cannot find their way home, even if they want to. I learned on the website Starling Talk that some lost starlings have been recovered after they tamely approach nice people who realize they must be pets and put up FOUND BIRD signs, but this seemed a long shot. I was certain that Carmen was lost forever.

  After searching and calling all over the neighborhood for a couple of hours, I finally heard a loud starling contact call from the very top of the thirty-foot cypress in front of our house. Starlings regularly use this high-pitched chirp to stay in touch with their flock or with their young. I didn’t know if Carmen knew how to make this vocalization, and I couldn’t see the bird that the call was coming from, so very high in the tree. But I hoped. We borrowed a tall ladder from our neighbor and placed it against the side of the house, close to the cypress. Tom climbed up and up, thinking that if the bird we were hearing was in fact Carmen, she would see him. “Hi, Carmen!” he kept calling. Great, I thought, fretting. Now I had to worry that I would never see Carmen again and that my husband would plunge to his death from the top of a precarious two-story-high ladder. But the bird in the tree began to make its way down, branch by branch. “Carmen!” I called. It was her. As soon as she saw Tom, she flew to his shoulder and clung breathlessly to his T-shirt. She was as happy to be back as we were to have her.

  As I dot the i’s on this manuscript, Carmen almost miraculously continues to flourish. Maybe starlings really do have nine thousand lives. But in this story, there are still three funerals to tend to.

  All three funerals—father, son, and starling—have been widely misunderstood in the Mozart mythology. Leopold’s came first. In the spring of 1787, Wolfgang heard from Leopold that he was very ill. Leopold was a hypochondriac, over-inclined to seek sympathy, and Wolfgang knew this, but his was a ruminating heart, and he would still have worried endlessly. Then a new letter: Leopold was much improved! Then word from a friend: Leopold was ill indeed, perhaps mortally. Poor Wolfgang! He was not prepared to lose his father. But in this moment, he gathered his strength and his quill and composed one of the most famous letters in the Mozart epistolary canon. The letter began roundaboutly but typically for a missive between Wolfgang and Leopold. Mozart called up the unique intimacy between father and son as he wrote about the world of current music and, within it, one of their favorite subjects—others’ declining talents. This, he whispered to Leopold, is “just between you and me.”

  Ramm and the 2 Fischers—that is, the bass singer and the oboist from London—were here during the Lenten Season; if the latter did not play any better when we heard him in Holland than he is playing now, he certainly does not deserve the reputation he has.… To put it in one word, he is playing like a Miserable student.… Well, it’s the Truth—

  Eventually, Wolfgang was ready to come around to his worries.

  This very moment I have received some news that distresses me very much—this all the more as I gathered from your last letter that you were, thank God, doing very well;—but now I hear that you are really ill! I need not tell you how much I am longing to hear some reassuring
news from you yourself; and, indeed, I confidently expect such news—although I have made it a habit to imagine the worst in all situations.

  There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mozart’s distress, and the self-knowledge revealed in the last sentence is as touching as it is true. He never recovered from the death of his mother, never lived down his self-blame, never for an instant ceased to worry about Constanze and all his loved ones. Wolfgang himself was ill at the time with acute kidney problems. But in this moment, instead of further fretting, he penned a short meditation to Leopold, a kind of philosophy of death and dying. It was a message of consolation, meant equally, as I read it, for father and son.

  Death, if we think about it soberly, is the true and ultimate purpose of our life. I have over the last several years formed such a knowing relationship with this true and best friend of humankind that his image holds nothing terrifying for me anymore; instead it holds much that is soothing and consoling! And I thank my god that he has blessed me with the insight, you know what I mean, which makes it possible for me to perceive death as the key to our ultimate happiness.—I never lie down at night without thinking that perhaps, as young as I am, I will not live to see another day—and yet no one who knows me can say that I am morose or dejected in company—and for this blessing I thank my Creator every day and sincerely wish the same blessing for All my fellow human beings.*

  Mozart expressed himself honestly, and his sentiments surely served as a quiet gesture of both penitence and forgiveness between father and son. It is a beautiful letter. The passage is often quoted as an expression of Mozart’s feelings toward death and a suggestion that his own passing, just four years later, was, if not actually welcomed, at least met with equanimity. It is read as an overlay to the more sublime moments of the Requiem. But I think it is important to remember that this is the expression of a twenty-nine-year-old emotionally distraught musical genius who is about to find himself parentless. In my reading, this passage is a cry to God from a son outwardly expressing calm while inwardly on his knees, rending his garments. On Mozart’s desk was the draft of Don Giovanni, with its flawed Everyman whom no critic has ever been able to fully condemn, redeemed as he is, at least on some level, by the harmony of Mozart’s arias. The don is about to be claimed by the flames of hell. Mozart was more conflicted than the lines of this letter would indicate, yes, and yet surely he repeated the sentiments to himself as, awaiting more news of his father, he lay down before a fitful sleep. Death: soothing, consoling. This was the last known letter from Mozart to his father.

  Leopold died on May 28, 1787. He was sixty-eight years old, a good age for the time. It is generally accepted that Mozart’s failure to attend Leopold’s funeral in Salzburg was a protest, conscious or not, against the passive-aggressive authority and control that Leopold wielded over Mozart for the whole of his life. The psychology of the relationship was certainly complex and damaging, but Mozart never outgrew a feeling of honest devotion to his father—a mixed sense of love, guilt, and unfulfilled obligation that would plague him until his own death. It is surely true that Wolfgang could not face the death of his father straight on. But at the time Leopold died, Constanze was immobilized with a septic leg, there were young children in the house, and the couple was deeply in debt. Mozart could not leave his wife, could not afford the travel, could not face the expectation, once in Salzburg, of laying out cash for mourners and services. He did not protest the funeral; he simply could not go.

  Star died just two months after Leopold. I’ve discussed that, as a tribute to his starling, Mozart arranged a formal funeral, invited friends as formal mourners, and performed a dramatic reading of the elegy he had composed for the bird. This is the whole poem:

  A little fool lies here

  Whom I held dear—

  A starling in the prime

  Of his brief time,

  Whose doom it was to drain

  Death’s bitter pain.

  Thinking of this, my heart

  Is riven apart.

  Oh reader! Shed a tear,

  You also, here.

  He was not naughty, quite,

  But gay and bright,

  And under all his brag

  A foolish wag.

  This no one can gainsay

  And I will lay

  That he is now on high,

  And from the sky,

  Praises me without pay

  In his friendly way.

  Yet unaware that death

  Has choked his breath,

  And thoughtless of the one

  Whose rime is thus well done.

  Reveling in the contrast is irresistible: Mozart absented himself from his father’s funeral, then buried a common bird with pomp and flute music and original poetry! Many believe that the starling’s funeral was simply a farce—one of Mozart’s many indecorous social shenanigans. Others suggest that the starling service provided Mozart an avenue for catharsis in the face of his father’s death and perhaps also a transference of duty; he was doing for the starling what he believed he ought to have done for Leopold. I find truth in both these views. A fancy bird funeral certainly would have appealed to Mozart’s sense of the absurd. Meanwhile, for all Mozart’s complicated genius, his personal relationships were touched with a childlike simplicity and a deep neediness. Feeling that he had neglected Leopold, Wolfgang surely found comfort in the ritual of a funeral, a receptacle for his displaced grief.

  But there is a third way of thinking of the funeral, one that would be obvious to anyone who has lived with a starling. While honoring the psychological nuance of the theories above, we can also recognize that Mozart felt honest sorrow over the loss of his bird. In the three years he lived with Star, Mozart had struggled for professional recognition; faced periods of financial despair; become estranged from his sister Nannerl, the bosom confidante of his youth; and lost two beloved children and his father. Through all of this, the starling had been present as an always-cheerful, ever-mischievous companion, a mirror of what was liveliest and most creative in Mozart’s own soul, a simple, constant friend. Frivolous rhyming cannot mask the truths contained in this poem. Mozart knew the funeral was silly and over the top. But it was also sincere, an act of affection, a parting gift. He buried his bird in the garden and marked the tiny grave with a stone.

  Physically, Wolfgang was not a strong specimen, and he knew it. He was small—probably just over five feet—and slender. In the fine unfinished oil painting by Joseph Lange (Mozart’s brother-in-law, husband of Constanze’s sister Aloysia) on display in Salzburg, Mozart is pensive, with soft cheeks and the suggestion of bags beneath his eyes. The painting shows just his face, and one can imagine such a head topping a doughy body, but it was not so. Mozart was always thin. He had never been in robust health, had suffered recurring episodes of rheumatic fever as a child, and was bedridden time and again with respiratory ailments, some of them life-threatening. He survived bouts of scarlet fever, acute infectious polyarthritis, and a juvenile case of smallpox that left him pockmarked for life. In the years preceding his death, Mozart was often bedridden with severe colic and several other unidentifiable illnesses. In spite of his assurances in the death letter to his father that he was always serene in public, he suffered from the headaches, melancholia, and anxiety to which profoundly creative minds are often prone. And he was, like his father, a bit of a hypochondriac. Even with all of this, at age thirty-four, with a desk and mind full of unfinished compositions, with a docket of travel to performances of successful work, and with a family that was not yet comfortably provided for, Mozart was unprepared for his final illness, which caught him unawares.

  Unfinished portrait of Mozart. (Joseph Lange, 1782)

  In July of 1791, before the onset of his sickness, Mozart was approached by an anonymous stranger and engaged to compose a requiem for the wife of an illustrious Viennese gentleman. The commission was generous; Mozart accepted, began the work, then set it aside to complete La clemenza di Tito for the coronati
on of Emperor Leopold II in Prague.

  It sounds apocryphal. Mozart, unknowingly near his own death, is drawn into a prescient, ghostly commission by a shadowy figure who in some biographies wears a dark hood. And yet it is true. The stranger was an emissary of Count Franz von Walsegg, whose wife, Anna, had been only twenty-two years old when she’d died suddenly in February. (The seeming Victorian-Gothic depiction of the emissary in the story—gaunt, hooded, and shadowy—was actually an accurate description of Walsegg’s courier Franz Anton Leitgeb, who was tall and thin with a taciturn disposition and a dark Turkish complexion and who always dressed in gray.) It is likely that Mozart knew both the count and his young wife, as Walsegg often invited the Viennese cognoscenti to his country home for music. One of the reasons Mozart was approached anonymously might have to do with the count’s proclivity to commission music and then to pass the work off as his own. When guests would ask about the composer of a piece that had been performed in his parlor, Walsegg is known to have asked them to guess. And when the response was a polite “Well, it sounds like it could have come from your own quill,” the count would just fix a pleased little smile on his lips. Passing off a requiem by the great Mozart as his own tribute to his beloved dead wife was the probable motive for secrecy.