Museum für Musikautomaten, Seewen (SO)
Until November 30, 2024

Until 150 years ago, if you wanted to enjoy music, you either had to attend a musical performance or make music yourself. From 1878 onwards, a turning point occurred—the phonograph and gramophone made music technically reproducible. The devices began their triumphal march and became a mass medium.

It would be decades, however before sound recordings could match the quality of a live performance. The piano in particular, with its wide tonal range and subtle differences in volume, was difficult to record before the invention of the microphone. Brilliant entrepreneurs and engineers attempted to counter this shortcoming with a bold invention—the reproducing piano. Instead of being played through a funnel, the playing of the most famous pianists was to be reproduced by a real piano. In the fall of 1904, the Freiburg-based company M. Welte & Söhne presented a sensation. Their latest invention, the “Welte-Mignon,” played the most difficult piano pieces almost exactly as the great virtuosos in the concert hall were accustomed to. Nothing was reminiscent of a mechanical instrument, everything sounded completely natural. When other companies followed suit, a flourishing market developed. Over the next three decades, thousands of recordings were made, which even today allow us to immerse ourselves in the “golden era” of piano playing with fascination.

Under the title “Magic Piano”, the Museum für Musikautomaten (Museum of Music Automatons) is dedicating a special exhibition to self-playing pianos and the museum’s 20-year research collaboration with the Bern University of the Arts.

https://www.musikautomaten.ch/mma/de/home/sonderausstellung/vorschau/magic-piano.html

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