Specialists describe the initiative as a historic event and expressed hope that music lovers will soon be able to hear the original sound of the piano on which Fryderyk Chopin himself used to play. 

Until the 12th of December, visitors to the Chopin Museum in Warsaw have the opportunity to see the legendary musician’s last instrument being restored. Indeed, Chopin’s last piano is currently undergoing conservation works led by an American connaisseur in historical pianos, Paul Mc Nulty, in the Chopin Museum in Warsaw. 

Before his death, Fryderyk Chopin received a Pleyel piano back in the year 1848 from his relative, Camille Pleyel, a renowned piano maker from Paris. In 1849, after Chopin’s death, the piano was purchased by his student Jane Stirling, and later given to the composer’s sister Ludwika. It arrived in Poland by ship the next year. 

The instrument was then kept cautiously by the subsequent generations of Chopin’s family. In the mid-1920s, it was sold to the National Museum in Warsaw, where it was displayed until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944.

In the aftermath of the uprising which was brutally crushed by the Germans, the instrument was taken by the occupiers to Austria. It then came back to the Polish capital in 1946. 

The piano was later given to the Fryderyk Chopin Society in 1967. For a century, the instrument was virtually not used for any performance but rather displayed as a museum object. It has been part of the collection of the National Chopin Institute since 2005.

The current renovation project, which was preceded by the instrument’s scanning, chemical analysis and X-ray photographs, includes the adjustment of the mechanism in an attempt to make it sound as it was when it was still used by Chopin himself. 

Author and photo: Sebastien Meuwissen