On May 27, 1784,
as he followed Vienna’s back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
and listened to the allegretto themefrom his own piano concerto in G-Major
repeated by a starling in a cage.
He’d written it only five weeks before—
had God given them both the same message?He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.
This Issue
April 27, 2000