Bird’s-Eye View
When composer and former court conductor to the Esterházy princes, Joseph Haydn, died in Vienna in 1809, his estate included an unusual heir: a Congo African Grey parrot. Haydn had brought the bird back from his highly successful trips to London in the 1790s and kept it in a small tin cage in his Viennese home. The parrot, famous for its gift of mimicry, could whistle many of Haydn’s melodies and was so renowned that it sold for the remarkable sum of 1,415 guilders at auction—more than Haydn had once paid for his entire house.
The curious fact that not only Haydn, but also opera composers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and Gioachino Rossini kept birds and taught them their melodies inspired artist Edith Payer to create the five-part series Bird’s-Eye View. The works are fabric-printed collages in which Payer replaces the heads of the composers with those of birds. The backgrounds often reference stage designs from their operas: the Verdi-parrot, for example, stands in a scene from Aida, Wagner appears before the ship in The Flying Dutchman, and Mozart is pictured in front of Schinkel’s celestial backdrop from The Magic Flute. Even the scientific-sounding titles (such as Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus Verdis or Sturnus vulgaris Amadeii) merge human and bird into hybrid identities.
