Siegfried’s Mechanical Music Museum in Rüdesheim, Germany
is a popular stop for riverboats cruising the Rhineland filled with timber-walled medieval buildings, cuckoo clock stores and beer gardens containing live oom-pah-pah bands. But it’s also home to a fantastical museum, Siegfried’s Mechanical Music Cabinet. This is the brainchild of eccentric Siegfried Wendel, whose hobby in the 1960s was to rescue and repair 19th-century “automatic musical instruments” that were being discarded as scrap metal. Today, Herr Wendel is still at work in his 70s, and his Musik-Kabinett displays 350 or so automatic musical instruments, prototype jukeboxes, hand-cranked carnival machines and monstrous pianolas, all still in working order. Several gramophones still transmit voices directly from the 19th century, as they turn wax barrels that recorded the voices of opera legends such as Enrico Caruso. The most elaborate devices are the century-old orchestrions- huge wooden artworks as large as minibuses that play all the instruments of an orchestra, including trombones and cymbals. The sound can be deafening, and the first audiences in the early 1900s apparently regarded them as either unholy creations of the devil or the Eighth Wonder of the World. But everyone marvels at the device that plays six violins in perfect harmony like an invisible chamber group.