The golden era of piano playing and its self-playing wonders - relived
Special exhibition from 19 September 2024 to 30 November 2025
Just 150 years ago, in order to enjoy music, you either had to attend a musical performance or play 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.
However, it would be decades before sound recordings could compete with live performances in terms of quality. 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 overcome 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 autumn 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 used 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 that still fascinate us today as we immerse ourselves in the "golden era" of piano playing.
Under the title "Magic Piano", the Museum of Music Automatons (MMA) is dedicating a special exhibition to self-playing pianos and the museum's 20-year research collaboration with the Bern University of the Arts (HKB).