Paid by the Bird

For some reason, writers like to write about the profession of writing. I suppose it’s what people want to read about. Me, I want to read about other ways of earning a living. For example, bird trapping. Here’s Papageno, in The Magic Flute, explaining how he makes ends meet:

I trap birds, birds of all species, for the Queen of the Night and her ladies. Every day they give me, in exchange, food and drink.

And what kinds of food and drink, Papageno, do they give you for your birds?

Wine, sugar bread, and figs.

A good living. The opera never makes clear why the Queen of the Night needs a constant supply of live birds (something to do with those four high notes in her first aria?), nor where she gets the wine and figs from, but it’s nice to know that Papageno is a productive part of the Queen’s economy.

The best operatic profession that I know of, however, comes from Der Mond, by Carl Orff. As the opera opens, four wandering students see a glowing object in the night sky. They ask a farmer what it is, and he answers:

That’s the moon. Our mayor bought it for three Talers and hung it from that oak tree. He has to pour oil into it every day so that it keeps shining brightly. In exchange we pay him one Taler, once a week.

What a racket! I mean, be conservative, say that each week the moon burns seven-tenths of a Taler worth of oil. And assume that the mayor has to pay two-tenths of Taler to offset the moon’s weekly carbon emissions. That’s still one Taler in profit for the mayor every ten weeks, or about five Talers a year, if you figure upkeep. After two years, the mayor will have paid off his initial investment and will have made enough profit to buy two more moons. Within five years, he owns every natural satellite from here to Jupiter. Then he switches to solar power, and he makes an even bigger killing, because the weekly overhead on a solar-powered moon is, like, zero.

Anyway, it’s every writer’s professional dream; the dream of ceaseless royalties; something to get us off this diet of figs and wine.