Sparkie Williams the talking budgie honoured in Berlin opera
Mar 26 2009 by Tony Henderson, The Journal
IT’S enough to leave even Sparkie Williams lost for words one of the world’s great cities will tonight see the premiere of an opera based on the life of the North East’s most famous budgerigar.
Owned by Mattie Williams, of Forest Hall on Tyneside, Sparkie put 3,000 rivals to flight in 1958 when he won the BBC International Cage World Contest for talking budgies. He was so good he was not allowed to defend his crown.
With a vocabulary of 553 words and 353 phrases, he became a national figure and made LP records including Pretty Talk with Mrs Williams.
It was issued by Capern’s, the budgie seed company for whom Sparkie made commercials, to help owners teach their birds to talk and sold 20,000 copies.
Sparkie died in 1962 and was stuffed and mounted on a perch.
Now major British composer Michael Nyman, known for his film scores, has written an opera, Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, which will be staged tonight at the Berlin Festspiele music festival.
Mr Nyman asked the Natural History Society of Northumbria, which owns the bird, if Sparkie could make a celebrity appearance at the Berlin event.
So yesterday, the budgie made his first flight out of the UK in the care of society archivist June Holmes.
For years, the stuffed Sparkie was on show at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle, where visitors could drop a 2p coin in a slot and hear a tape of the budgie talking.
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