Mozart’s Starling

The same week his father died, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducted a funeral for a starling he had purchased three years earlier in Vienna. Guests at the service wore solemn attire, and Mozart, then thirty-one, eulogized his pet as “not haughty, quite, but gay and bright.”

“My heart,” he said, “aches when I think of him.”

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He had chanced upon the bird while ambling through town, a whistle on his breath, one imagines, for Mozart was known to whistle, and perhaps the starling inside its cage inside the shop heard him and whistled back. Who knows what sparked their alliance? A winged creature with a spotted breast, a wingless man in a dappled coat. Mozart bought the bird and brought him home, and the starling stayed with him through moves and countermoves, themes and variations: the birth of one son, the birth and death of another, a kidney infection, a cold, a visit from Haydn, the creation of operas and string quartets and concertos, works for piano and orchestra and sopranos, like Mozart’s wife, Constanze, herself a warbler of startling powers.

Picture the bird in a cage in a corner of the room, a presence as captivating as Mozart himself, whom Haydn pronounced “the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”

Did he ever yearn to be someone else?

By six his gifts were such that his father hauled him across Europe in a coach, posting ads at every stop for the songster whose improvisational skills so exceeded anything seen before that gawkers were invited to give the boy any thing to play at Sight, or any Music without a Bass, which he will write upon the Spot without recurring to his Harpsichord.

Thus did the wunder kid enrich his family.

He was small, and prone to illness, and so fragile he repeatedly sought assurances that he was cherished. A court trumpeter who knew Mozart as a boy remembered how he would “ask me ten times in one day if I loved him, and when I sometimes said no, just for fun, bright tears welled up in his eyes.”

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The bird Mozart brought home as his pet, just for fun, belonged to the species Sturnus vulgaris, the common European starling we know by its abbreviated tail, freckled torso, oily sheen, and long yellow beak built for drilling. A windy instrument, capable of sounds both melodic and mechanical: whistles, trills, burbles, rings, wheezes, clicks, rattles, cheeps, chortles, snarls, and at least eleven different calls, including one to warn of peril and one to court copulation.

In the wild, Sturnus vulgaris congregates in flocks so dark they block the sun.

Caged, Sturnus vulgaris turns burlesque. This virtuosic mimic can copy Latin, conquer Greek, sing Dixie, replicate musical patterns, and channel Cagney:

Gimme a kiss baby, gimme a kiss.

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“A foolish wag,” Mozart called his darling, who learned to parrot the first five measures of the finale of the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, a work so filled with birdlike trills one music historian has likened it to an avian concerto. Flutes flutter, strings scatter and converge, bassoons squawk. The whole swells and soars, a murmuration gliding now toward heaven, now toward earth, flitting from delirium to doubt, doubt to discord, then taking wing again.

An assembly of birds by a composer so besotted by his own he jotted his starling’s jargon in a notebook and praised the animal as “a dear, shifty rascal.”

But Mozart’s rascal did more than mock. To the seventeen-note theme of the finale of the concerto, the bird introduced a pair of variations: he held one note too long and sang another sharp, an accidental of the sort a child might insert while learning to play the violin. Mozart, enchanted, copied the passage down and appended a coda: How pretty!

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Birds possess any number of talents we fail to fully grasp. Each fall, for example, tens of thousands of them leave home, some traveling from one end of the globe to the other in pursuit of fodder, driven...