Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  She used to fearlessly follow me everywhere. During my morning shower, she would flit from the shower-curtain rod to the top of my head. When I shampooed my hair, she would gape through my locks to explore the suds, so I put a stop to this practice, worried that she was ingesting soap.

  Grown-up Carmen does none of these things. Young birds are sweetly naive and open to exploring their world without caution. This is part of why mortality is so high in the first months of a bird’s life. Adult birds grow wise and more wary, for good reason.

  The longer Carmen lives with us, the more she settles into a routine. She is comfortable and unafraid in the kitchen, dining room, my study, and of course her aviary. If I wander elsewhere in the house, she becomes visibly nervous and will stick steadfastly to my shoulder. Overall, though, I don’t see her as more fearful in life, but more tranquil. I love to see that she has, in her way, made herself at home—made her own home within our larger one, with her own paths and ways and routines and places of comfort.

  In my mind, Carmen’s unfolding story in our household—both physical and aural—mingles constantly with the story of Mozart and Star. I live with not just a wild bird, but Mozart’s bird. Every day I pick up my pen and smile, just as Mozart did, at this starling’s iridescence, her wildness, her chattering. I transport myself by the power of visualization to the Mozarts’ home, where Star, like Carmen, would have settled in his own way into their family routine. Even across the distance of time and culture, Mozart’s life with Star and mine with Carmen surely share a great deal. Yes, Mozart was a musical genius. But in the bare practical outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our shoulders.

  During the very first days that I started to wonder over the story of Mozart and his starling, I began poring over guidebooks to Vienna and Salzburg and treatises on the life and culture of these places. I tried to re-create the streets that Mozart walked and the rooms where he lived with Star in my mind’s eye. I am armed with a tenacious conviction that somehow the presence of the people who live in a home resides in the atmosphere of the walls forever. Although Carmen could teach me a great deal about how anyone, including Mozart, would have lived with such a unique bird, I knew that Mozart’s rooms held even more secrets. Like so many Mozart pilgrims before me, I packed my bags for Vienna. First, I would find the perfect Sacher torte. Then I would wander the streets of the city and the halls of Mozart’s home.

  It was September 29, 1784, when the young Mozart couple moved from their cramped quarters on the Graben to sizable apartments on Domgasse, just around the corner from the great spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna’s beloved landmark, visible for miles around. In the carriage, Star likely rode in a small cage alongside the Mozarts’ swaddled son, Carl Thomas, just nine days old. The weather was fair, and in spite of the trouble of relocating with a newborn, Mozart and Constanze were surely in good spirits. Their boy was rosy, and they were moving to gorgeous third-floor apartments in a desirable neighborhood. Besides, they had to travel only a few blocks, just a ten-minute walk from their previous home, perhaps a few minutes longer in laden carriages. Though the Mozarts moved frequently during their life together in Vienna—fourteen apartments in just ten years—the home at Domgasse is the only residence that still exists.*

  Anyone seeking to understand this period of Viennese history and culture is indebted to the rare, on-the-ground writings of cultural commentator Johann Pezzl, who between 1786 and 1790 compiled some of the only extant eyewitness cultural commentary on the place and time. I studied his Vienna Sketches obsessively in the weeks before my journey. Pezzl reports that the third floor (what Americans would call the second floor, considered the third floor in Vienna, where the basement is counted as floor one), although the most expensive, was by far the most coveted—another reason the Mozarts were thrilled with their move. The ground-level floor and the one above it were undesirable because of their nearness to “dust from the street, the smells of stables and sewers, and the noise of wheeled vehicles passing outside.” But once you got above the third floor, rent became cheaper again, since, though the air and the views were finer, “it is hard work carrying the necessities of life, wood, water, etc. to these heavenly heights, and while the number of steps brings a reduction in rent, it increased the price to be paid for delivery of goods carried up 150 steps ten times a day.” Thus, “in the top floors of city buildings, in garrets and in attics, nestle the poorest type of tailors, copyists, gilders, music copyists, wood-carvers, painters, and so-on.” Pezzl’s view is as political as it is colorful: “These attic floors are often crawling with hordes of children, whose numbers and constant requirements often worry the poor father to the same extent as the rich and distinguished man living on the second floor below has his worries about being able to find a sole heir for his family.”

  In the fresh modern air, it is difficult to imagine the horrific dust in the lives of all Mozart-era Viennese, which Pezzl describes as the greatest of plagues. “It is the dried-out dust of chalk and gravel, it irritates the eyes and causes all sorts of lung complaints. Servants, runners, hairdressers, coachmen, soldiers, etc., who have to be out on the streets a great deal, often die of pneumonia phthisis, consumption, chest infections, etc.… The worst situation occurs when, after several warm days, a strong wind springs up… the dust penetrates mouth, nose and ears… and one’s eyes weep.” The Mozarts were better situated in these apartments than we realize at first glance from our modern, dustless vantage point. Above the dust, below the labor.

  Der Mehlmarkt in Wein, the center of Vienna in Mozart’s time. (Bernardo Bellotto, 1760)

  I visited Vienna and Salzburg in the autumn, just after the tourist season, when crowds were smaller and prices were a bit lower, but the weather would be—if all went well—still fine. Fortune smiled; my days in Austria were warm and idyllic. Even today, overlaid with tourist-trade Mozartian tchotchkes and chocolates, Vienna feels almost enchanted. The musical soul of the city is palpable and true.

  I like to fancy myself an easy traveler, open to the serendipity of a journey, but on the streets of Vienna, I found myself, as I usually do in such scenarios, clutching my Rough Guide like Lucy Honeychurch with her Baedeker. The map within led me to the Mozarts’ Domgasse apartments, now the Mozarthaus museum. Though Wolfgang and Constanze loved these rooms, where they lived for almost three years, they had to leave in 1787 because the rent was just too high. In the decades that followed, there were various leaseholders, and, though no one knows exactly when it happened, at some point the rooms were subdivided into three smaller living spaces.

  In 1941, Nazi politicians supervised the acquisition of the lease to one of these smaller apartments and created a modest museum to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death for the German Reich’s Mozart Week in November of that year. Historian Erik Levi, in his book Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon, explains that the Nazis were particularly keen to exploit this anniversary, seeing the “universal accessibility” of Mozart’s music as an “ideal emotional link between the home and the war front.” Ultimately, Levi claims, Mozart was more difficult than many other popular composers for the Nazis to colonize, as his philosophical and moral outlooks, overtly at odds with their agenda, were so well recorded in his many letters.

  It wasn’t until 1976 that the City of Vienna acquired the lease to all of the Domgasse rooms. The original layout was restored, and a simple museum was set up. In the mid-1990s, the Wien Museum organization hoped to attract more visitors by reinvigorating the presentation of Mozart’s former residence. The rooms were primped, and scrubbed, and instilled with a modern curatorial philosophy. Even so, the review in the Rough Guide was unenthusiastic. I could not wait to see this house and read over the pages dozens of times before my trip searching for a glimmer of hope, but I found none. This is what the Rough Guide reports:

  Sadly… despite all the history, the museum is a bit disappointing. A lift whisks you to the t
hird floor, so you have to wade through two floors of manuscript facsimiles and portraits before you reach the apartment itself. Only one of Mozart’s rooms actually retains the original decor of marble and stucco… and there are none of Mozart’s personal effects and precious little atmosphere.

  My other favorite guide, Rick Steves, did nothing to revive my dwindling hope for this museum pilgrimage, which I had dreamed would be the high point of my Viennese journey. Note that both reviews begin with the same word:

  Sadly, visiting this museum is like reading a book standing up—rather than turning pages, you walk from room to room. There are almost no real artifacts.

  Dear me. But I had traveled across the globe to research these very quarters, to see how Wolfgang and Constanze made their life in Vienna and how Star might have fit into it. I lifted my chin and stepped off the narrow cobbled street, prepared to be underwhelmed.

  Instead, I was transformed. Certainly the entrance is a bit sad. After a promising approach through a marble archway, the place that horse-drawn carriages would have deposited Mozartian visitors, the new reception area evokes the lobby of a miniature strip-mall Cineplex. There is flat gray carpet, a coatroom lined with cold metal hangers (complete with a stern overseer demanding your wrap and bag), and a discouraging coffee room with Ikea-style chairs and a vending machine. Not an inch of charm in sight. But soon you take the stairs up and up, leaving the modern carpet behind, until you are peering over a rail into the open courtyard and then facing the servants’ door into the first room of the Mozart home. The rooms and hallways have indeed been scoured, painted, and made safe enough for toddlers of overprotective modern tourists to wander the stairwells without getting their little heads stuck between the iron rails. But the apartments themselves, the rooms in which the family lived their daily round, are otherwise little changed since Mozart’s time.

  The critique of the museum in the Rough and other guidebooks comes, I think, from the reasoning behind its curation. The accepted standard when creating museums around the residences of famous artists and composers has been to do up the rooms in the fashion of the time, to create a memorial to the imagined life of the subject. If the original furniture of the inhabitant is not extant (Mozart’s is not), then similar period furniture or good reproductions are secured and placed in the rooms as the curator surmises they might have been arranged by the famous occupants. This is what we have come to expect and enjoy. The more progressive curation philosophy at Mozarthaus revolves around an admission that we don’t know for certain what function each room served for the Mozart family. Instead of imposing their own, possibly erroneous vision on an unsuspecting public, the curators take the refreshingly modern approach of inviting visitors to join them in imagining how the rooms might have been used. They speculate in the commentary that is tacked to the walls, but the suggestions are full of accompanying questions marks—“Question Mark by Way of Invitation,” they call it: Study (?); Bedroom (?). Instead of certainty, we are offered a moment of creative vision. Here, visitor, you stand in this room, in the rustle of air carrying voices of the past, arias risen to the rafters. You are here. What do you think?

  In my opinion this is not at all boring. It is challenging, beautiful, and alive. Wandering the rooms for hours, I felt that my own imagination was carried away in just the right fashion—with an air of possibility that would not have been attainable in a more traditional exhibit. For surely it is the apartment itself and the whispering ghosts who reside here that are the gem of the museum. And I realized with delight that the curator’s approach mirrors the path of the story I am weaving around Mozart and his starling, which comes to life in these rooms but must remain riddled with essential question marks.

  In each room there is placed just one period artifact suggestive of life in the apartments. These are all eighteenth-century pieces, similar to the Mozarts’ own, though none of them are original to the household. A table in the probable parlor. A single fork in the kitchen. Meanwhile, an artist has created miniature ivory-colored reproductions of all the furniture known to have belonged to the Mozarts. These live in a model of the house in the first room, the servants’ quarters, and we are invited to look inside, to arrange the furniture in our mind’s eye. The design of the furniture is mainly rococo and baroque, as middle-class families like Mozart’s rarely had a house furnished entirely in the neoclassical style of the time.

  The museum curators offer another playful bit of whimsy on the wall behind the furniture-filled dollhouse. A small shelf displays a set of tiny statues representing the key characters in the household—Constanze, Mozart, and Carl Thomas, and a crib holding baby Johann Thomas Leopold, who was born at the apartment in October of 1786 and lived just a few weeks. Each figure is formed in red or yellow resin and is about as big as my thumb. To my great surprise and happiness, I found statues not just of the humans of the household but also of the Mozarts’ little dog, Gauckerl, and a bird in a cage: Mozart’s starling. I leaned over and peered excitedly at the little yellow bird. Admittedly, the statue does not look much like a starling, but who cares? I was thrilled to see that Star was not just my own idiosyncratic obsession but part of this modern telling of Mozart’s story.

  The professed purpose of the statuettes is to aid us in our imaginative wandering through the apartment. In each room, the figurines of the characters that were likely to have used it are placed in a row on a narrow shelf alongside the curatorial commentary. Thus, Wolfgang and Constanze stand in the parlor. The couple and both boys, who likely slept in the same room with their parents, are in the small bedroom. Gauckerl is pretty much everywhere. And Star? Visions of Carmen’s life in my own home swirled through my imagination, and I felt as if this bird figurine leapt from its shelf as a full-size starling and perched on my shoulder. With this unusual guide, I wandered from room to room, asking my question: Where did you fly?

  I started in the servants’ quarters, where cleaning supplies, firewood, and the maid’s bed were likely kept; the room is narrow but bright. It is unclear where Mozart’s manservant, Joseph, would have slept, though he surely lived with the family. It is possible that he unrolled a mattress in the hallway or kitchen at night and rolled it back up during the day (in this he would have fared better than the other servants and even the family in winter, as his bed would have been nearest the woodstove, the warmest place and only source of heat in the freezing-cold house). This was the Enlightenment, not an episode of Downton Abbey. Even in the richest households, a family’s relationship with the servants was more casual than it was in those post-Edwardian times, or in the Victorian era, still a hundred years away. The original kitchen was long ago demolished to allow for a central elevator—not for the exhibit, but for the modern residents who inhabit the other apartments. The rest of the building, in fact, still fulfills its original function; several families live upstairs in the four-hundred-year-old rooms above the exhibits.

  After you pass through the servants’ room (period item: portable wrought-iron candlestick), a small dining room (porcelain fruit dish), and what was likely a sort of guest room (simple wooden chair), the apartment opens out into the largest and sunniest space on the floor, probably the salon. The curators have placed a gaming table from Mozart’s time in the center of this room, since a full-size billiards table would have been too large, though Mozart loved the game. This is likely the room where parties, dances, and musical performances were held, with chairs rearranged for guests and musicians to suit the occasion.

  The rooms progress in a kind of L shape, and at the far end of the apartment is the door to a small bedroom with a window that looks out on the cathedral spire. The ceiling is layered with thick, carved, gilded stucco—coils of flowers and fleurs-de-lis and cherubs better suited to an aristocratic mansion than these middle-class rooms. In the 1720s, the apartment was owned by master stucco artist Albert Camesina, who worked for the imperial court, and it was he who added this exquisite ceiling. Stucco workers of Camesina’s caliber were not cons
idered simple builders; they were well respected as skilled artisans. (In Mozart’s time, the apartment was called Camesina House; later, it was known as Figaro House in honor of the famous opera that was composed under its roof.) In my imagination it was this ceiling that sealed Mozart’s delight in these lodgings. He could lie on his back and let the music in his mind and the stresses on his nerves melt into the imagery over his head. There he felt calm, bohemian, and a little rich.

  I had been searching the tiny groupings of statuettes expectantly as I explored each room. But after the suggestion of Star’s existence at the very beginning and the promise that we would see the figurines throughout the exhibit, there were no further bird statuettes. I queried the docent, who laughed good-naturedly but did not seem to share my wondering over the bird. (Later, I called the historical society. Where might the bird’s cage have been? No one was willing to venture a guess.)

  Eventually I came to the final room. Between the parlor and the little bedroom is an expansive Study (?). Surely it was. Airy, light-filled, with space for a grand piano, violin, viola, and the traipsings of children, servants, students, musicians, dog. This was the perfect working room. And it was here that the ghost-bird on my shoulder finally fluffed his shining feathers.

  In order to give Carmen the most time possible outside her enclosure, I typically bring her up to my writing studio while I work. This takes some preparation. I close the high windows, of course. Then I hide anything that I don’t want to be nibbled, poked, stolen, thrashed, tromped on, or pooped upon. If it is winter, I turn off the radiator and cover it with a blanket so Carmen doesn’t land on it and burn her delicate little feet. (Foot injury or infection is a common cause of death among captive birds, and foot health is something I watch in Carmen carefully, providing her with natural perches of varied width and roughness.) Once the room is ready, I place a fresh paper towel within reach (to swiftly wipe up pooplets), lock Delilah in Claire’s room, then go down to open Carmen’s aviary so she can fly to my shoulder and hitch a ride back up the stairs. Since reaching her wary adulthood, she has become suspicious of the stairwell, so I walk slowly and whisper calming sentiments as we climb. Once inside my studio, she is comfortable. This is her favorite room. So much to do! So many ways to pester me!