An Automatic Virginal

What if a virginal could play without a musician?

That is exactly what makes the 1619 virginal by Ioannes Wegner, now in the Musée de la Musique in Paris, so extraordinary. Made in Leipzig, it is described by the museum as a virginale à cylindre—a virginal with a cylinder.

At first glance, it looks like a conventional early keyboard instrument. But hidden within it is a mechanical music-playing system.

How did it work?

Instead of someone pressing the keys, a cylinder carried the musical instructions. As the cylinder rotated, projections or pins activated the mechanism connected to the keys. The appropriate keys were depressed and the jacks plucked the strings.

In very simple terms:

cylinder turns → pins activate the mechanism → keys move → strings are plucked → music plays.

The cylinder therefore functioned rather like an early mechanical music "program". Instead of a performer deciding which note came next, the information was physically encoded into the machine.

It is an astonishing idea for 1619.

Was it the first?

We should be cautious about calling it the first automatic keyboard. Mechanical musical instruments existed earlier, particularly automatic organs and clockwork instruments.

However, 1619 is extremely early for an automatic virginal, and the Wegner instrument appears to be one of the earliest surviving examples. Another remarkable automatic virginal survives in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg: an octave virginal by Samuel Bidermann the Younger, dating from around 1640.

So Wegner's instrument predates that surviving example by about twenty years.

Are there others?

Yes—but they are exceptionally rare. The Bidermann instrument in Nuremberg is the clearest surviving comparison, and other automatic spinets associated with Bidermann are also recorded.

The rarity of these instruments makes the Paris virginal particularly important. It is not simply an early keyboard; it represents an early attempt to store and reproduce music mechanically.

And this is where the instrument suddenly seems surprisingly modern.

Centuries later, the player piano would use perforated paper to tell the piano which notes to play. The technology was completely different, but the principle was remarkably similar: encode musical instructions in a physical medium and let a machine interpret them.

The Wegner virginal was doing something very similar—with a wooden cylinder—more than two centuries before the pianola.

Today, the little instrument sits in the Musée de la Musique, inventory E.2413.

It is a wonderful reminder that the dream of a machine that can make music without a musician is far older than we might imagine