I was reading Jim Lynch’s lovely novel Border Songs and discovered that one of his characters mentioned it. When I asked Lynch where he’d heard about Mozart’s starling, He told me,“I read it in your book.” Oh, dear! I began to worry that I’d been spreading an apocryphal story, but further research assured me that the tale was true. Mozart discovered the starling in a Vienna pet shop, where the bird had somehow learned to sing the motif form his newest piano concerto. (pp.10 to 11)
April 12 1784, Innere Stadt, Vienna. Mozart sat at the small desk in his apartment, dipped his quill pen, and entered the lovely Piano Concerto No.17 in G in his log of completed works. This was Mozart’s finished composition; he was twenty-nine years old.
May 26. Mozart received confirmation from his father, Leopold, that the fair copy of the concerto he had sent by postal carriage had arrived safely in Salzburg. Wolfgang wrote back that he was eager to hear his father’s opinion of this work and of the other pieces he had sent; he was in no rush to have them back “so long as no one gets hold of them.” Mozart was always a little paranoid that his music might fall into the wrong hands and imitated or outright stolen by a lesser composer.
As for what happened next, there are many possibilities. But it might have gone something like this:
May 27, Graben Street. Mozart’s stockings pooled in wrinkles around his ankles, and he paused on the bustling roadside to pull them up. As he tucked the thin silk under his buttoned cuffs, he was startled by a whistled tune. It was a bright-sweet melody, a fragment beautiful and familiar. It took Mozart a wondering moment to recover the shock of hearing the refrain, but when he did, he followed the song. The whistles repeated, leading him down the block and through a bird vendor’s open door. There inside, Mozart was greeted by a caged starling ….. (pp.28 to 29)
…..But how did the starling in the shop learn Mozart’s motif? The composition was meant to be an absolute secret, not slated for public performance until mid-June, when
it would premiere under Mozart’s direction with the gifted young student for whom it was written, Barbara Ployer, at the piano. (p.29)
The story is not well known in its detail, and some musicologists acquainted with only the surface of the tale, claim that Mozart must have responded in a jealous fury to the bird’s pirated rendition of his own composition, But when we look into the composer’s pocket notebook, we see that nothing could be further from the truth. Beneath the words Vogel Stahrl, Mozart wrote his own version of the tune, the starling’s version.
