Mozart's Starling

Haupt (The Urban Bestiary) intertwines the story of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's starling with her own story of living with one of America's most hated birds, the starling. Mozart discovered his bird in a 1780s Vienna pet shop singing a tune from his latest concerto; when it died, he arranged an elaborate ceremony complete with dramatic elegy. This book is part history (the origin of North American starlings), part natural history (the habits and psychology of starlings, from both personal experience and the scientific literature), and part whimsical imagining of how the bird might have lived within the busy Mozart household. Along the way, Haupt discusses the changing view of pets in Mozart's time, the nature of language (the starling as a challenge to linguist Noam Chomsky), Mozart's A Musical Joke as starling-inspired, a consideration of whether birdsong is music, and the meaning of three funerals: that of Mozart's father, his starling, and the composer himself.