Description of the attraction
The birthday of the Museum of Music is 1911. It was then that Michelangelo Lambertini, a musicologist, began to collect a collection of musical instruments, scores and iconographic samples, which were scattered in various social and religious organizations, so that they were all in one place, a museum. A little later, he joined forces with Antonio Carvalho Monteiro, the collector who acquired the collection of Alfred Kyle, which was going to be taken out of the country. All the collectibles were put together and kept in a building on Rua do Alecrim.
Lambertini and Monteiro died in 1920, and the museum project was put on hold. In 1931, the curator of the National Conservatory Museum and Library, Thomas Borba, discovered the collection and continued to expand it, buying the remainder of Monteiro's collection from his heirs.
The museum moved periodically, as the number of exhibits increased. In 1994, the Music Museum was opened in a new location - underground. The museum is located on two adapted floors of the western wing of the metro station Alto Dos Monjos. In addition to the fact that the collection of the museum includes musical instruments, among the exhibits there are also printed and handwritten documents, an extensive music library of more than 9000 works. There are many ceramics, sculptures, photographs, prints and paintings.
The museum's collection of musical instruments is one of the richest in Europe and includes more than a thousand instruments of the 16th-20th centuries. Musical instruments include the famous Boisselot et Fils piano, which Franz Liszt brought from France in 1845, and Antonio Stradivari's cello, which once belonged to King Louis, who played it. Separately, it should be noted that there are only two copies of the Eichentopf oboe of the 18th century in the world, and one of these copies is in the Museum of Music in Lisbon.
