* It is difficult to sex starlings accurately before they reach breeding age, the first spring after hatching. Often the irises of female birds are more defined around the pupil than those of young male birds, but this measure is subjective and only about 70 percent accurate. I used calipers to measure Carmen’s skull, which was in the female range, but ranges overlap—a large female skull can be larger than a small male skull. Once the birds acquire their breeding characteristics, things change. Males have longer, shaggier plumage on their shoulders and a punky look to their neck feathers, which are raised during singing and display. The bases of the bills also change color during breeding season and match our cultural stereotyping: girls’ are pink, boys’ are blue.
* There are scores of Mozart biographies in the world, and though they typically agree on the known facts, they all provide varied, contradictory views of the composer’s personality. When veering into matters having to do with Mozart’s nature or inner life, I focus as much as possible on what I have been able to glean from his own words as they appear in his hundreds of published letters and relied primarily on two fine translations, which I use interchangeably in this book: Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, with letters selected, edited, and translated by Robert Spaethling; and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Life in Letters, with selected letters edited by Cliff Eisen and translated by Stewart Spencer. I recommend both volumes highly.
* Later, Mozart would refer to the bird by the more common spelling Vogel Staar. Today in German the species is typically referred to as Vogel Star.
* Doing one’s own hair might not sound so impressive, but it was common even among the middle classes to have a friseur make home visits to do up the high styles of both men’s and women’s hair or wigs.
* It’s important to do some research before using natural limbs in a bird’s home, as some bark is toxic to certain species.
* I’ve heard some naturalists question this, but Carmen was a perfect experiment. Her first complete autumn molt filled the house with clouds of feathers. (It is astonishing how many feathers are layered onto one little bird—about three thousand on a starling.) It was a nerve-racking few weeks for me. Every time I came home, Delilah would greet me at the door with feathers in her mouth, and I’d rush to Carmen’s cage while searching the floor for blood and bird entrails, but she was always safe and happy. Like most cats, Delilah just enjoyed playing with feathers. Once I survived the psychological torment of the molt, I admired Carmen’s fresh, starry breast. Come spring, all her wild colleagues had lost their white tips, but Carmen’s, protected from the elements, were as pristine as ever.
* Though starlings are just as reviled in New York City as they are everywhere else in the U.S., this genesis story is honored in the Bronx with a Starling Avenue, a Schieffelin Avenue, and a Schieffelin Street, and it is rumored that one of New York City starlings’ favorite roosts is Central Park’s Shakespeare Garden.
* Droppings would have to build up in an area’s soil for at least a couple of years in order for levels of the fungus to become dangerous, and no case of histoplasmosis has been proven to be connected to starling droppings, but the possibility still causes concern and is often mentioned in dissertations on starling damage.
* For comparison, that same year the USDA killed 730 cats, 5,321 white-tailed deer, 61,702 coyotes, and 16,500 double-crested cormorants.
* Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who also raised a starling, termed this bill motion yawning. In spite of the risk that it might be confused with baby-bird food begging, I prefer to call it gaping. After all, yawning is equally confusing, as the birds are not sleepy when they are exploring this way.
* In this, I realize she is like many creatures, including humans, who use their mode of eating to explore and learn about the world. Baby humans put things in their mouths. So do baby bears. Parrots learn with their tongues (they cannot learn to count objects by looking at dots on cards, as pigeons can, but they can count if they are allowed to explore raised dots with their funny, big parrot tongues). Even we grown apes turn things over, exploring visually, smelling, acquainting ourselves with new objects as we would if we were going to pop them into our mouths. Perhaps some of this is lost in very recent times, when much of what we encounter comes from a flat screen—we see different images, but always with the same texture, fragrance, and weight.
* Sherman Alexie chose this quote for the epigraph to his Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; he attributed it to W. B. Yeats, and others have done the same, but the origin seems to be French surrealist Paul Éluard.
* I would have her come out and read with me, but like many birds, Carmen acquires a kind of confused agitation as the sun goes down. Keepers of budgies and other pet birds will recognize the behavior; if she’s not inside her aviary when darkness falls, she gets disoriented, bashing into walls and windows that she navigates readily during the day, and she is easily startled. We make sure she is closed safely in her aviary by sunset.
* The physical exterior of the Graben apartment building still stands, but the interior has been extensively remodeled as a hotel, so the rooms are nothing like they were during Mozart’s life.
* The evocative phrase “more-than-human world” was first used twenty years ago by philosopher David Abram in his book The Spell of the Sensuous. It has since become a well-loved expression in the ecological literature.
* This is generally true. It seems that about one in ten female starlings does have the ability to make these sounds. Or perhaps all female starlings have the physiological ability and only this smaller fraction makes use of it.
* Purina Lab Chow, now called LabDiet, is a real thing, as I learned in college. One day I was trying to find the office of a psychology professor with whom I had a meeting and walked past a room with a sign on the door: ANIMAL LAB. I didn’t even know there was an animal lab at my tiny liberal arts school. Inside, I found drawers full of rodents, and I opened every one; in the last drawer, there were six fluffy Siberian teddy-bear hamsters. This species of hamster does not do well in groups, especially in small spaces; they become aggressive and even cannibalistic. The hostility of this group was focused on one sweet, cream-colored, long-haired male, who was covered with bites, had part of one ear nibbled off, and was bleeding from several wounds. I did not think, in the moment, about the fact that I might be ruining someone’s thesis research. I just plucked up the bleeding hamster and put it in the left pocket of my jacket. I looked quickly around the room. Nothing; no one. So into the right pocket I dropped a handful of the hard, square kibbles from the giant bag of Purina Lab Chow that slumped against the wall. Diogenes the hamster (I was a philosophy major) lived many happy years.
* This is not true, of course, in places where birds gather in numbers, such as colonial nest sites or autumn roosts, where the accumulated waste can be an eyesore and even a human-health concern.
* Correct Latin would have been Ecce probatum est (“There is proof”).
* I am told that when properly pronounced, Sauschwanz, “pig’s tail,” rhymes with Rosenkranz.
* Sadly, Nannerl’s marriage was never happy—it is doubtful that her wishes were ever much taken into account, day or night. Years before her marriage, she received a proposal from a fine young man whom it seems she truly loved, but Leopold objected to his trade and prospects and convinced Nannerl to refuse him. Leopold eventually urged his daughter into a marriage with magistrate Johann Baptist Franz, an older widower with five children and a home that was a loveless prison for Nannerl. She had three children of her own, including a son who was raised by Leopold. After Nannerl was married, she and Wolfgang slowly fell out of touch.
** An example of the high-spirited, political wordplay: “If you are a poor blockhead—become a K _ r, Kleriker [Cleric]. If you are a rich blockhead, become a landlord. If you are an aristocratic but poor blockhead, become whatever you can so you may gain your bread. But if you are a rich, aristocratic blockhead, become whatever you want to but not—I implore you�
�a man of reason.”
* It is said so often that Mozart was a “working stiff” (as one well-known essay about the maestro puts it) and composed only for work, for livelihood, for money. It is true that Mozart had to write for a living, and the bulk of his working life was carried out with an eye to this reality, but it is abundantly clear that he also wrote for fun, for art, and for love. He wrote for charity. He wrote silly songs for the entertainment of friends, and beautiful parlor music for the delight of guests. He wrote in his sleep. He wrote because he was Mozart, and music spilled forth from him, constantly and by nature.
* Things took an unexpected turn when a certain Facebook video went viral: a muscular, tattooed man was giving his colorful little finch a bath in the sink, just as we do with Carmen, only instead of collecting water in a bowl, he used his cupped hands. Everyone on earth sent the video to me, and I had the seemingly innocent thought, Wow, I bet Carmen would love this! Mistake. It was tricky because my hands were much smaller than the guy’s in the video and also because Carmen is much bigger than a finch. But she did love it and quickly became spoiled. For a long time she refused the bowl, and insisted on my hands, which got me even wetter.
* Some scholars argue that only Mozart’s left ear was atypical, since in a couple of portraits, his right ear is visible, though his left ear is always hidden. Nissen clearly refers to plural ears.
* Many respected scholars strongly disagree with Araya-Salas’s conclusions. One of the most eloquent counterarguments comes from Emily Doolittle and Henrik Brumm in their paper “O Canto do Uirapuru: Consonant Intervals and Patterns in the Song of the Musician Wren,” published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies. Here, the authors outline parallels between human conceptions of music and the song of a different South American wren, the aptly named musician wren, and many other songbirds as well. They make the welcome suggestion that explorations of such parallels are best approached from an interdisciplinary standpoint, with experts in music, ornithology, and audiology sharing their knowledge, to prevent one-sided, or simply mistaken, conclusions.
* The brown creeper is a tiny songbird with woodpecker-like adaptations for creeping up barky tree trunks as it searches for insects. It is dark brown, like bark, but with a bright white belly, a slender curved bill, and a stiff tail to support it vertically. It is one of my all-time-favorite birds and was also beloved by the late social and environmental activist Hazel Wolf. I met Hazel when I began working at the Seattle Audubon Society years ago, where she was the secretary until her death at almost 101. I got in the habit of meeting her at her simple apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and taking her to lunch every month or so. We would walk to the little Thai restaurant down the block. The walk took longer if it happened to be election time—Hazel would make me join her in leaving flyers on every door we passed to “get out the vote.” She was grassroots, old school, and formidable. Almost every lunch, she would tell me about how elated she felt the first time she’d seen a brown creeper, a memory that circled in her elder’s mind and one that I never tired of hearing. The brown creeper forages by clinging to the trunk of a tree with its feet and making its way up. Up, up, up. It doesn’t skirt up and down like a woodpecker. Just up. When it’s ready, the creeper flies down, and then begins its journey ever upward again. “Just like me,” Hazel would say, twinkling.
* Many of the ideas about death expressed in this letter are inspired by Freemasonry, and Leopold would have been familiar with its premises, having joined Wolfgang’s own lodge in Vienna. Another influence was likely the thought of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn). A copy of his tract Phaidon, or The Immortality of the Soul was well thumbed by the time it was listed in Mozart’s effects after his death.
* Though Mozart himself had composed pro bono works to fund the Freemasons’ organization in support of the widows of composers and artists, he had failed to subscribe for his own soon-to-be-widow. Without foundation, and with overt antifeminist sentiment, Constanze has been vilified for centuries by Mozart biographers and fans as dull, unmusical, under-devoted, moneygrubbing, and a generally undeserving partner to Mozart’s genius. But after Wolfgang’s death, Constanze worked against all manner of difficulty to settle her husband’s debts and to face the practical task of establishing financial stability for her little family: she appealed to the emperor for a widow’s pension in light of Mozart’s service at the court; she organized concerts of Mozart’s work and oversaw the publication of his music. Over time, she and the boys became financially secure.
* The tools of the bloodletting treatment of Mozart’s time are on display in the collection of mismatched artifacts on the top floor of the Mozarthaus museum. When I’d read about bloodletting in the past, I had always imagined a small razor, but instead here was a horrific brass box full of thick, hinged, hook-ended blades, never sterilized, of course, that looked like instruments of torture.
* It is usually suggested that Mozart was buried only in a linen shroud, but of all the Josephian reforms, the edict to allow only shrouds, no coffins, for burial was met with the most public outcry. It went one step too far. Several months before Mozart’s passing, Joseph reluctantly lifted this element of his edict and allowed families, for a fee, to purchase a simple coffin that would be deposited in the common graves. Volkmar Braunbehrens notes in his detailed Mozart in Vienna that in the list of Mozart’s funeral expenses, there is a line item for the hearse. Hearses were provided for free unless a coffin was purchased—evidence, argues Braunbehrens, that Mozart might have been buried in a coffin. He notes also that Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Constanze’s second husband and one of Mozart’s early biographers, wrote vaguely that “the coffin was deposited in a common grave and every other expense avoided.” But Nissen wasn’t there; he had Constanze as a source, but she did not make the funeral arrangements, and it is possible that he just assumed there was a coffin. There is for now no definitive answer.
Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.
Sign Up
Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters
Mozart's Starling Page 21
