Bread On The Waters And Where It Leads

At the Highgate end of Hampstead Heath there is a series of ponds. One of them is full of birds. These are generally water birds so they are happy enough floating around in the pond. Which makes it unusual that there is a platform in the middle of the pond which birds are supposed to sit on. This wooden structure suspended on floaters has nothing to offer water birds which are designed to swim in the wet stuff and provides no sort of shelter for land birds which have no reason to put themselves in the middle of a pond when they can take their water from the sides where the people with food are sitting. Nevertheless if you wait long enough you will find particularly fat birds will go and sit on it and squawk and ruffle their feathers in exaggerated gestures.

To understand this behaviour it is not necessary to be an ornithologist. You simply need to be a historian. What the birds are doing is obvious to anyone with a grasp of some of the creative endeavours of past ages. It would be sad if the strenuous efforts of previous genuinuses were completely submerged by pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo which seeks to explain away every action in purely rational terms.

The first opera for birds was written by Christoph Willibald Gluck in 1774. This was during his French period. Having made the drama of operas more important than the star singers who performed them for the first time the logical next step was to replace the human singers with birds. The French court had a particular fondness for singing birds so his ideas quickly found favour there. If only he had lived to see the decline of the saxophone as a classical instrument and rescored the saxophone parts for birds with the same pitch of coo the whole of musical history might have developed differently.

The first performance of Also Quack Zarathustra was not a complete success due to the over-chromaticism of the twittering nightingales who as the birds of aristocrats had insisted on performing the main parts. They got so carried away with their chords and fugual harmonies that their skills overshadowed the production. They also had insufficiently dramatic voices. After much argument Gluck persuaded the birds to accept light lyrical roles in future operas and principally the ever popular Tree Stan And His Owl, Der. Large dramatic birds were subsequently recruited for the main parts as they projected right to the back of the room and the full force of the sonorous pronouncements of Zoroaster could impress itself on the audience. If they were true of course Gluck would not have had this problem. But in spite of the essential stupidity of the text the recast opera was well enough received and a grateful nation provided Gluck with a pension. It is not commonly realised that Gluck became the first and last person in the history of the French Kingdom to be granted the dispensation of permanent freedom from pigeon attacks on weekdays as well as the Sundays when all perfumiers and carvers of holes in cheese enjoyed the same privilege and still do to this day.

Having had a minor triumph Gluck sought to develop his new form further. He persuaded opera houses to keep specific bird breeders on retainer to ensure a supply of strongly voiced birds who would then be refined into quality singers at the first Twitty Academies. Some of these birds became famous. Tweet William was much in demand as a baritone in works such as The Masque of Orfeathers and E Fanciulla Del Redbreast. Similarly Gluck developed a new system of notation to indicate the specific birds required to produce those notes. The tails on the ends of crotchets and quavers are the last relic of this short lived practice. Unfortunately there was one problem Gluck could not solve. An opera stage was too tempting an environment for a bird. More than once in every performance a singer would fly around the stage and warble from a new place thus destroying the dynamics of plot and the dramatic effect of the words. Stage managers who had previously tempted the birds to their correct places with pieces of bread now had to throw whole loaves to try to get them to keep to their marks. The distinctive shape of the French loaf was developed at this period to make the bread easier to throw. Soon the sight of loaves of bread winging across the stage became more of an attraction than the bird operas and led to the development of French circus. Bird operas continued to be composed but they had had their day as a public attraction. All that was left was to release the birds and that would be the end of the matter.

As is usual in such cases the first casualties were those who had been manipulated into taking up the activity in the first place. Yet the birds were not about to give up without a peck. Having discovered the benefits of fame and fortune when it came to dealing with other birds they were not about to give up on bird operas. There may not have been much of a human audience but this was of no consequence. The birds began writing their own. Suddenly they understood why humans were using bird feathers to write with and refused to invent pens for another generation. Birds became prolific composers and librettists and used their new skills to explore ranges of bird experience never understood by humans. Of course to begin with they wrote these works for replicas of human stages. But soon they had developed more suitable methods of staging their works. The platform in the middle of the Highgate pond is one of the few remaining British examples of bird opera stages. Here birds perform the long forgotten works of their ancestors in their own languages to their own kind. The guardians of Hampstead Heath know better than to upset birds with loud voices and sharp beaks by removing it so the tradition continues. It is only a shame that the once almost universal practice of birds writing operas was so cruelly halted by the introduction of recorded music and the shooting of the bird composers who savagely attacked the vinyl records when they were produced believing them to be made of dessicated humans ground into a black paste by evil theatre directors.

Highgate is an area which fancies itself as cultured. It is no surprise that operatic birds continue to practice their art there. The only problem is that to preserve their habitat they have to charge other birds admission to their operas. Not all birds are ready to part with their hard earned worms to hear what they regard as their right. Rossini did not write an overture called The Thieving Magpie for no reason but his attempt to alert humans to what was going on went unheeded. None of us seem to know what gives humans the desire to feed birds. Now we can understand that it is folk memory of the brief hour of human composed bird operas that makes us so keen to give them enough material comfort that they are happy to spare a few insects to ensure their culture survives.