Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

When his father, Leopold, died, Wolfgang did not travel to Salzburg for the services. When his starling died, two months later, Mozart hosted a formal funeral in his garden and composed a whimsical elegy that proclaimed his affinity with the starling’s friendly mischievousness and his sorrow over the bird’s loss.

Mozart was so delighted by the starling he almost forgot his shock. He and the bird whistled phrases back and forth, sharing snippets of their repertoires. Then Mozart pulled out his pocket notebook and copied out the bird’s species name, Vogel Stahrl, a version of the German name for the bird referred to as the European starling in North America and the common starling in England.* One commentator claims that Mozart named his bird Star, a misreading of his note that simply referred to the species. Even so, it is handy to employ a moniker in telling a story, and as there is no record of the bird’s actual name, Star will do nicely.

Wolfgang laments:

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.

In 1960, a Lockheed L-188 Electra serving Eastern Airlines Flight 375 took off from Boston’s Logan Airport for Philadelphia and other points south. Seconds after takeoff, the plane collided with a flock of twenty thousand starlings. Hundreds of birds were sucked into the machinery; two of the four engines lost power, and the plane plunged into the sea. Sixty-two people died, including several who were in town for a shoe-sales conference. After the crash, officials tested seasoned pilots on flight simulators to see if any of them could have saved the plane in such a scenario. All failed. In more testing, live starlings were thrown into running engines. It was found that just three or four birds could cause a dangerous power drop.

Any bird, even when it is raised by hand, will become wary of people when left alone in a cage. In Meredith West’s modern study, the hand-raised birds that were kept on the porch rather than in the house lost their tameness among humans.

Carmen is out of her aviary when friends are around, we offer “poop shirts”—some

is said that when Wolfgang was composing music in his mind, his outward actions changed little, but something about his countenance became for a moment a touch distant, as if he were listening to a faraway birdsong, before his quill sped along again.

Mozart believed, always, in beauty and in harmony and would not sacrifice either, no matter how dark his themes. He wrote this out in a famous 1781 letter to Leopold that is now taken as an articulation of his musical philosophy and a foundational statement of Viennese classicism: “Passions, violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and Music must never offend the ear, even in the most horrendous situations, but must always be pleasing, in other words, always remain Music.”

Pythagoras based his inquiries into harmony on musical notes, but as any string player knows, no note that is actually performed is mathematically pure—every note played on an instrument is influenced by other notes, the subtle vibrations of the other strings, and even nearby instruments (when my daughter plays a D on her cello, the D string on my violin a few feet away hums, even though no one is touching it). These are musical overtones, and they create the complexity we look for in a good musical instrument.

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 coronation 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 ...