Mozart’s starling: the bird behind our name

The short answer

On May 27, 1784, Mozart paid 34 kreuzer for a starling that could sing the opening of the finale of his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453, which he had entered in his catalogue of works about six weeks earlier. In his account book he wrote out the bird’s version, which pauses on one note and sings G sharp where the concerto has G, and added “Das war schön!” (“That was beautiful!”). The bird lived with him for three years; when it died on June 4, 1787, he buried it in the garden and wrote it a comic poem.

The 1784 purchase and the account-book entry

Mozart bought the starling in Vienna on May 27, 1784, and the first record of the bird is the entry he made that day in his account book, also called his expense book. He had started it that year, at the same time as the catalogue of his works. According to Wikipedia, which cites Hermann Abert’s biography, he kept the expense book for only about a year, while the catalogue ran until his death in 1791.

The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (NMA), the scholarly edition of Mozart’s complete works that the Mozarteum Foundation publishes online, reproduces the entry in the preface to the volume that contains K. 453. It is short. Across the top run the date, “Vogel Stahrl” (starling bird) and “34 Kr.” Below is a single staff of music in G major and cut time. Under the staff Mozart wrote “Das war schön!”

“Kr.” stands for kreuzer, a coin of the day; sixty made a gulden. The NMA’s English translation prints “34 Crowns” and “That was nice!”, while Wikipedia, which cites Otto Erich Deutsch’s documentary biography for the German text, reads kreuzer and gives “That was beautiful!”, as our homepage does. The editors of that NMA volume, Eva and Paul Badura-Skoda, say Mozart had apparently enjoyed hearing the bird whistle the theme of the concerto’s last movement and bought it for that reason, “even if the intonation may not have been quite clean.”

The tune: the finale theme of K. 453, bar by bar

The bird sang the first phrase of the theme that opens the concerto’s finale, an upbeat and four bars, with two changes: it paused on the G at the end of the first full bar, and it sang G sharp instead of G in the next bar. Mozart’s entry keeps both.

Mozart wrote the concerto for his pupil Barbara (Babette) Ployer and entered it in his catalogue on April 12, 1784. Its finale, an Allegretto in cut time, is a set of variations on a plain, singable theme and ends with a Presto. The table sets the start of that theme beside the line in the account book.

Pitches follow Wikipedia’s transcription of the entry, which cites Deutsch, and its corrected version of the tune, which follows the musicologist Daniel Heartz. We checked both against the NMA: its reproduction of the entry shows the fermata and the sharp, and its score of the finale (page 46 of the volume) has neither. The concerto also has grace notes, staccato dots and a slur that the account-book line leaves out.

Read as a transcription, the entry is careful work. Mozart knew exactly how his tune went, and he still wrote the pause and the sharp where he heard them instead of tidying them away. The line records the performance, not the composition.

How did the bird know a six-week-old tune?

Nobody knows. The documents record the purchase, not how the bird learned the tune, and the main accounts tell the story in different orders:

• The NMA preface says Mozart heard the bird whistle the theme and bought it because of that.
• Wikipedia’s article on the common starling, citing the book Birds Britannica (2005), says he bought it from a shop after hearing it sing a phrase from a work he had written six weeks earlier and that had not yet been performed in public.
• Wikipedia’s article on Mozart’s starling suggests the reverse order: presumably Mozart taught the bird the tune in the shop, or wherever he bought it.

“Not yet performed in public” is uncertain too. In a letter of June 12, 1784, quoted in the NMA preface, Mozart tells his father that Babette Ployer will play her new concerto in G the next day at a musical evening at the Ployers’ house in Döbling. The musicologist Michael Lorenz has argued that Mozart may have played it earlier, at his concert with the violinist Regina Strinasacchi at the Kärntnertortheater on April 29, 1784, as Wikipedia’s article on the concerto summarizes him. If so, the tune had been heard in public four weeks before Mozart bought the bird.

Starlings can learn quickly: Wikipedia’s starling article notes that a wild starling has been seen to copy a sound it heard only once. To us, the simplest explanation is a composer whistling his newest tune in a bird shop. Nothing in the documents shows that it happened.

Why starlings are such good mimics

Common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) are vocal learners that build borrowed sounds into their own song, so a pet starling picking up a whistled melody is ordinary behavior for the species. A male’s song bout can run a minute or more: pure whistles, then variable sequences that take in snatches of other birds’ songs and other noises, then clicks and a final burst of high song. Practiced birds have up to 35 variable song types, according to Chris Feare’s 1996 account of the species in British Birds, which Wikipedia cites.

In their essay on vocal copying, Paul Ehrlich, David Dobkin and Darryl Wheye name the European starling as a species whose vocal mimicry is well known. Their explanation is repertoire size: a large, varied song can help a male attract a mate and intimidate rivals, and borrowing from the surroundings, even dog barks, machinery or human whistling, is one way to grow it. They add that mimics usually give themselves away through their own tone, timing or context, so listeners are rarely fooled.

Pet starlings pick up human phrases readily. Konrad Lorenz, as cited on Wikipedia, noted that since the words mean nothing to the bird, it mixes them up and uses them at odd moments. Meredith West and Andrew King, two researchers with long experience of pet starlings, linked the birds’ mimicry to their lively social interactions.

Their anatomy helps. A 2025 study in Scientific Reports analyzed 115 videos, posted online, of birds imitating the robot R2-D2 from Star Wars; eight were of starlings. The starlings copied the robot’s complex, multi-tone sounds more accurately than the parrots did, and the two groups did equally well on simple beeps. The authors put the difference down to the syrinx, the bird’s voice organ: a starling controls its two sides independently, so it can make two sounds at once, and a parrot can’t.

Starlings also seem to hear tunes differently from us. In a 2016 study in PNAS, five starlings learned to tell apart four-tone sequences that rose or fell in pitch. When the sequences were shifted slightly up or down, or played with a different timbre, the birds did no better than chance. They recognized versions that kept each tone’s spectral shape, meaning how its energy is spread across frequencies, far more readily, even with the pitch removed. A musician hears a melody as intervals that survive transposition; a starling seems to hear something closer to a string of sound shapes. That may be part of why a starling’s copy of a tune comes out close but not exact. This is our reading, not something anyone measured on Mozart’s bird.

June 1787: the starling’s funeral and Mozart’s poem

The starling died on June 4, 1787, about three years after Mozart bought it, and he buried it in the garden with some ceremony and a poem he wrote for it. It was a hard season. His father, Leopold Mozart, had died in Salzburg on May 28, a week earlier.

The funeral reaches us secondhand, mostly through Mozart’s early biographers, and the accounts differ:

• Franz Xaver Niemetschek, who interviewed Mozart’s widow, Constanze, mentions a much-loved starling that Mozart gave a proper gravestone, with an inscription, in the garden he rented.
• Georg Nikolaus Nissen, Constanze’s second husband, tells it the same way in his 1828 biography: on the death of a beloved starling Mozart wrote verses and put up a proper grave with an epitaph in his rented garden (page 668), and he loved animals, especially birds (page 670). The procession comes from elsewhere: Nissen’s collected notes, which Rudolf von Lewicki printed in the Mozarteums-Mitteilungen in November 1919. There Nissen writes that Mozart loved dogs and birds and always kept some, that his dog was called Puzzipaukel, and that when a bird died he arranged a funeral procession in which everyone who could sing had to follow in great veils, with a sort of requiem and an epitaph in verse (page 29). The note says “a bird” without naming the starling; Otto Erich Deutsch quotes it in English on page 225 of his documentary biography.
• West and King’s 1990 article in American Scientist, as summarized on RILM’s blog, has veiled mourners marching in procession, singing hymns and hearing the poem recited at the graveside.

The poem is dated June 4, 1787. It opens “Hier ruht ein lieber Narr, / Ein Vogel Staar” (“Here rests a dear fool, a starling”; our translation). It mourns a bird taken in his best years, insists he was not bad, only rather lively and at times a lovable rascal, and ends with a joke about its own author: dying, the bird spared no thought for the man “der so schön reimen kann,” who rhymes so beautifully. It is the same word, schön, that Mozart had written under the bird’s tune three years before.

Robert Spaethling, who translated the poem into English, reads it as funny and bittersweet, written while Mozart was grieving and deep in work on Don Giovanni. The folklorist Wolfgang Mieder has suggested that Mozart was partly writing about himself. West and King point out how closely pet starlings bond with their keepers, which makes the grief behind the comedy easy to believe.

Did the starling influence Mozart’s music?

It did not shape the concerto, which Mozart had finished six weeks before he bought the bird, and the idea that it shaped a later piece, A Musical Joke (Ein musikalischer Spaß, K. 522), is a hypothesis with no document behind it. Lyanda Lynn Haupt, a naturalist and the author of the 2017 book Mozart’s Starling, told NPR that the dates rule out the theory that the bird inspired the concerto.

The case for the later piece was made by West and King. In their 1990 article they wrote that many elements of A Musical Joke “bear the vocal autograph of a starling.” The timing is suggestive: Mozart entered the piece in his catalogue on June 14, 1787, ten days after the bird died. Haupt made a similar case to NPR; laid over starling song, the piece’s oddest passages show, in her words, the same “fractured phrases” and playfulness.

Treat it as a hypothesis. Wikipedia notes that West and King based the idea on the description of the piece in a record sleeve note. Many commentators hear A Musical Joke as a parody of clumsy composers, and Mozart is not known to have said what he meant by it. None of the sources we read cites a letter or note of his that connects the piece to the bird. The only documented musical link between Mozart and his starling that we know of is the account-book entry of May 27, 1784.

Why we named ScoreStarling after it

We named the product after the bird because its story is the job we do. In one line: a bird sang, and a composer wrote down what he heard. The name is Score plus Starling, and our logo is a starling whose raised wing forms the flag of a note. The less famous detail matters to us as much. Mozart’s line is a faithful record of what he heard, and what he heard was not quite what he had written. A transcription is a first draft, and you finish it by ear.

ScoreStarling listens to a recording and writes it out as MIDI and an editable score. Play it beside the recording, loop a passage, correct the notes and export. It also reads printed sheet music, score files and ABC or MusicXML text, and shows the score on a staff, as guitar TAB or as jianpu. Transcribing one instrument, a voice or solo piano and editing are free; a band and unlocking a score’s MusicXML and MIDI use credits. Every account gets 100 free credits a month, and the specifications have the rest. Our accuracy article says what we measured and on which recordings.

Sources

1. Neue Mozart-Ausgabe V/15/5, preface by Eva and Paul Badura-Skoda (1965), English translation — Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Digital Mozart Edition
2. Neue Mozart-Ausgabe V/15/5: Concerto in G, K. 453, third movement, score page 46 — Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Digital Mozart Edition
3. KV 522, Ein musikalischer Spaß — Köchel Catalogue online, Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum
4. Mozart’s starling — Wikipedia (citing Deutsch 1965, Heartz 2009, Abert 2016, West and King 1990, Spaethling 2000, Mieder 2003 and Niemetschek)
5. Piano Concerto No. 17 (Mozart) — Wikipedia (citing Lorenz 2006)
6. Common starling — Wikipedia (citing Feare 1996 in British Birds, Cocker and Mabey 2005, Lorenz 1961)
7. A Musical Joke — Wikipedia
8. Leopold Mozart — Wikipedia
9. Kreuzer — Wikipedia
10. Aus Nissens Kollektaneen — Rudolf von Lewicki, Mozarteums-Mitteilungen 2, no. 1, Salzburg, November 1919, pages 28–30 (scan at Bibliotheca Mozartiana digital, Mozarteum Foundation)
11. Mozart: A Documentary Biography — Otto Erich Deutsch, Stanford University Press, 1966 edition, page 225 (quoting Nissen’s notes as printed by Rudolf von Lewicki, Mozarteums-Mitteilungen, November 1919)
12. Biographie W. A. Mozart’s — Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1828, pages 668 and 670 (scan at the Internet Archive)
13. Mozart’s starling — Bibliolore, the RILM blog (2017), summarizing West and King, “Mozart’s Starling,” American Scientist 78, no. 2 (1990): 106–114
14. How Do You Bond With Mozart? Adopt A Starling — Tom Huizenga, NPR (April 20, 2017)
15. Vocal Copying — Paul R. Ehrlich, David S. Dobkin and Darryl Wheye, Birds of Stanford (1988)
16. What imitating an iconic robot reveals on allospecific vocal imitation in parrots and starlings — Nick C. P. Dam, Henkjan Honing and Michelle J. Spierings, Scientific Reports (2025)
17. Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition — Micah R. Bregman, Aniruddh D. Patel and Timothy Q. Gentner, PNAS 113 (2016)

Questions and answers

What piece did Mozart’s starling sing?

The opening phrase of the theme of the finale (Allegretto) of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453. Mozart had entered the concerto in his catalogue on April 12, 1784. When he bought the bird on May 27, he wrote its version in his account book: the same upbeat and four bars, with a pause on the G at the end of bar 1 and G sharp in place of G in bar 2.

What does “Das war schön” mean in Mozart’s notebook?

It means “That was beautiful,” or “That was lovely”; the English translation of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe preface has “That was nice!” Mozart wrote it under the starling’s version of his tune, in the account book where he recorded the bird (“Vogel Stahrl”) and its price, 34 kreuzer, on May 27, 1784.

What happened to Mozart’s starling?

It lived in Mozart’s household for about three years and died on June 4, 1787, a week after his father, Leopold. Mozart buried it in his garden and wrote a comic poem for it, dated that day, that begins “Hier ruht ein lieber Narr, / Ein Vogel Staar” (“Here rests a dear fool, a starling”). His early biographer Georg Nikolaus Nissen wrote that Mozart built the beloved starling a proper grave with an epitaph in his rented garden and loved animals, especially birds; the veiled mourners come from his private notes, first printed in 1919, not from that book.

Can starlings really copy music?

Yes. Common starlings are vocal mimics that work other birds’ songs and other sounds into their own song, and pet starlings pick up words and tunes from the people around them. They copy closely, not perfectly: Mozart’s bird added a pause and sang G sharp for G, and a 2016 lab study found that starlings recognize tone sequences by their spectral shape rather than by pitch.