Mozart's Magical Mystery Tour
by Patti Henningsen
May 27, 1784
Vienna, Austria Wolfgang Mozart skips down a crowded Vienna street, coins jingling in his waistcoat pocket. Times are good. He's just completed composition of a lovely piano concerto in G Major. The main theme of it plays repeatedly in his head as he contemplates the structure of the credenza he'll add to the finale.
He passes a pet shop, a beastly place packed with filthy cages and various animals barely surviving. Suddenly, the composer reels about! He looks up at a bird cage dangling above his head and stares incredulously at the starling therein who is boldly and defiantly whistling the main theme from the concerto he has just written!
"Das war schon," he proclaims ("That was beautiful!"). In the compulsive daze which most people find themselves in during the moments they purchase an animal they understand little about, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hands over 34 Kreuzer to the shopkeeper and proceeds homeward with his new pet starling. As soon as he arrives home, he jots down the song his starling has been singing. It is nearly identical to the theme of his just-completed concerto, not yet sold or even published.1
For three years, the bird and composer would be closest of friends and eventually, after the bird's death, Mozart would give him a first-class funeral. Mozart himself would end up in an unmarked, common grave with the ink still drying on his Requiem Mass--perhaps the greatest travesty of genius in history.
December 10, 1997
Vienna, Virginia He's Leaving Home
After ten years, Don and Jane have finally decided to donate their maverick Moluccan cockatoo to Parrot Rescue. For a decade, he's perched silently atop his living room cage watching their children grow up and learn to speak. And watched the two macaws across the room receive all the attention he, as a wild-caught, semi-tame bird, cannot accept. His wildness has kept him at arm's length from the deep emotional bonding his species demands from their companions. Don and Jane are tired of feeling guilty and place a call to Dede, the Parrot Rescue coordinator. The bird they call Conan is picked up and on his way to four months of foster care while an adoptive owner is sought out.
Through a truly strange, serendipitous event, I make the acquaintance of Dede in person one day. We have actually known each other several years through online correspondence--we just didn't know we were practically neighbors. I tell her I want to adopt a large bird, as I already have two medium-sized parrots. My Amazon couple are starting to need me less and less as their pair bond deepens. The male, Pumpkinhead, now about seven years of age, has reached sexual maturity. I know it will be several years, if not more, before he returns to his previous, loving self and craves my attention as he did when he was three months old. After convincing my husband, Chris, that we should get a cockatoo, Dede tells me about this 'huge, pink Moluccan' she wants to adopt out to an experienced parrot person, like me.
I've Got a Feeling
That first night, we put the bird we had decided to call Mozart in a cage in our bedroom where it is quiet and peaceful. It was recommended that he be quarantined from our other birds for at least three months. Mozart, the big, pink cockatoo, would feel safe here and more like we were all roosting together. In the wild, according to villagers on the island Mozart is from, large families of cockatoos sleep together in their hollowed-out tree nests and snore loudly all night.2 Luckily, Mozart did not snore, but about 3:15am on the dot, he softly began imitating the sound of an alarm clock. He would do this every night at this precise time for the next week. I discovered that's what time his foster father got up every morning to leave for an early shift. The precision of Mozart's alarm clock call was eerie. I began awaking at 3:14AM and was amazed that he began his alarm call the split second that our clock turned to 3:15.
I'm Looking Through You
But this feat did not compare to what happened about 4:30AM that first morning. (Luckily, it was Saturday and we could sleep in!) Chris and I began stirring about the same time just before dawn. We were both awake and heard the sound of Mozart eliminating and the plop! of his droppings on the cage floor. Amazingly, this was followed with Mozart uttering, 'Doo doo! Good boy!' We both shot straight up in bed, 'Did you hear that?î I yelled to my husband. 'Yes! He said what Pumpkinhead always says!' Mozart not only was talking for the first time in his fourteen years of captivity--with perfect enunciation I might add--but he had somehow picked up on the phrase I'd been using for ten years to potty-train my other parrots (yes, they can do that!). How did he do this? He hadn't even seen my other birds and came into the house when they were already sleeping so he couldn't have heard them either.
What was going on here? I was totally spooked. I actually began to feel afraid of this huge, angelic looking creature who somewhat resembled a wedding cake. Softly scalloped tones of pastel coral and buttercup blend together all over his feather-cloaked body giving him an ethereal, unworldly beauty. For weeks I would stare at him for long periods like Danté beholding Beatrice. He would continue to speak during the next week, and ever on after that. Sitting near him, transfixed by his rose-like beauty, I wondered endlessly about his odd abilities.
Do not curse the king, even in your thought; Do not curse the rich, even in your bedroom; For a bird of the air may carry your voice, And a bird in flight may tell the matter.
Ecclesiastes 10:20 Unable to sleep anymore since I had brought this unusually talented bird into my life, I lay awake thinking all night instead of sleeping--as I am wont to do and as is my curse in life. Many thoughts swam through my head; I thought about the saying, 'A little bird told me...,' I thought about the legendary Merlin (the magical owl friend of King Arthur), I thought about Old Abe, the battle Eagle of the Union Army during the Civil War, I thought about Mozart. I queried silently to myself in my head, 'I wonder if Mozart's telepathic?' 'Yes!' he proclaimed from his perch, answering my thought question aloud, his first utterance all day. I froze in fear where I lay. My mind raced, 'Are you really?' I thought again. 'Yes! Yes!' he once again answered aloud. Two more times I asked him and twice more he answered affirmatively, 'Uh-huh,' and 'Yeah Yeah Yeah!!!!!' In the cold, dark room, I panicked, totally spooked and frightened by this revelation. I passed out from fear.
Across the Universe
The things I continue to learn during the next three years from my precious pink cockatoo, who happens to be an endangered species, would reverberate through my life and the lives of my family and friends. I was brought kicking and screaming to the conclusion that science as we know it falls far short of understanding even the rudiments of the natural world. And it would remind me, ever so oddly, of the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his starling and what this genius of long ago must have discovered for himself from his little irridescent-feathered friend. To both Mozarts, I say, voila!
1 Sturnus, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring-Summer 1993), "Mozart's Fine Feathered Friend," by Malcolm Gladwell. North American Starling Fanciers Association.
2 BirdTalk, May 2000, pp. 76-83, "Spice Birds," by P. B. Henningsen. Fancy Publications.
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Labels: cockatoos, moluccan, Mozart, parrots, telepathy
