Beloved pet starling that helped improve maestro Mozart’s concertos
ON APRIL 12, 1784, Mozart completed the score of his Piano Concerto No17 in G. Six weeks later, he was astonished to hear a whistled fragment of his new piece coming from a pet shop.
Somehow, a caged starling had learned the phrase ahead of the concerto’s first official performance.
The cocky little bird had even given the tune a new twist, tweaking the last two Gs up a semitone. ‘That was wonderful!’ Mozart wrote in his diary that night, beside a transcription of the avian variation.
Although such a common bird was an unusual choice of pet for the status-conscious composer — wealthy Viennese preferred canaries and parrots — Mozart took it home to join his household during the most productive period of his life.
When the bird died four years later, Mozart was so heartbroken that he held a grand funeral, complete with a poignant eulogy he had written himself.
American naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt was intrigued by the bond between the maestro and his little mimic.
Starlings are rarely kept as pets these days, but they have a long history as domestic companions.
Pliny the Elder raised them for study and recorded that Julius Caesar taught them to ‘parle Greek and Latin’.
So Haupt and her husband halfinched a five-day-old starling from a local nest she knew was slated for destruction and raised her as a pet, feeding her cat food and playing her regular bursts of Mozart. Her charming account of life with the bird she christens Carmen, demonstrates what extraordinary characters they can be.
As hoped, Carmen proves a brilliant impressionist, quickly mastering the sound of a wine bottle opening, the cat’s miaow and her mistress’s call of ‘C’mere honey!’ More impressively, she learns to make the stopper sound before the wine is opened, greet the cat with a miaow and summon back her mistress with that ‘C’mere honey!’ She’s a clever and engaged family member, snuggling on to Haupt’s shoulder to sleep and pecking at the keys of her computer when she tries to type. She also poops all over the place. No wonder Mozart loved his starling: he found it easier to compose in a chaotic environment and rejoiced in toilet humour. (He once signed off a letter to his cousin: ‘Oui oui, by the love of my skin, I s*** on your nose, so it runs down your chin.’) Like his starling, Mozart was a brilliant mimic who loved drinking and, when Haupt discovers Carmen has a taste for wine, she imagines the composer sharing a glass with his pet as they bounced musical phrases back and forth, just like the birdcatcher Papageno and his lover in his opera The Magic Flute.
When Mozart’s beloved father, Leopold, died in 1787, money problems prevented his famous son from attending the funeral.
Some musicologists have suggested the strange Musical Joke he published shortly afterwards was a consequence of his grief-stricken mind.
But Haupt quotes ornithologists who hear the distinctive patterns of starling song in the piece he wrote during the three years he kept his bird.
Mozart’s pet died soon after his father. The two bereavements collided. He mourned them both in music that lives on centuries after his own premature death. Dizzying swarms of notes: rising, soaring, twisting and turning.
On a darker note, Haupt lives in America, where huge flocks of starlings — ‘murmurations’ — are a serious problem. They’re believed to cause $800 million (€674 million ) of damage to US agriculture each year as they binge-feed in cattle troughs.
A flock of starlings even brought down a passenger plane in 1960, killing 62 people, when hundreds of their bodies were sucked into its engine shortly after take-off from Boston — the worst ‘bird strike’ in aviation history.
Even the most devoted American bird-lovers despise the robust, invasive species for their ability to outcompete more sensitive native birds, such as bluebirds, chickadees and swallows.
Their emergence in the US is a peculiar story — they were shipped across the Atlantic from England in 1890 by the eccentric pharmacist Eugene Schieffelin.
The misguided Anglophile was on a mission to populate New York’s Central Park with every species of bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.
The chaffinches, nightingales and skylarks he imported all died. But genetic research has proved that the 80 starlings he released are the direct ancestors of all 200million of the birds that now live across North America.
Perhaps Schieffelin should have read his Shakespeare a little more carefully: the starling described in Henry IV is a curse disguised as a gift . . .