The Piano Hiding in a Sewing Table

Joseph Klein's Nähtischklavier

Not every historic keyboard instrument looks like a keyboard instrument. Case in point: a small, elaborately worked piece of furniture in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg that, at first glance, is simply a lady's sewing table — until you pull out a hidden drawer-like panel and find a complete piano keyboard underneath. The museum catalogues it as a Nähtischklavier ("sewing-table piano"), inventory number MIR1174, made in Vienna around 1830 by Joseph Klein.

A piece of furniture that plays music

The "sewing-table piano" was a real, if uncommon, category of early nineteenth-century furniture-instrument hybrid, built mainly by Viennese makers for a domestic market that prized both music-making and elegant, disguised functionality. From the outside, Klein's instrument reads as a piece of case furniture: a compact box on legs, sized more like a side table than an instrument, standing 82 cm high, 77 cm wide, and 47 cm deep.

The cabinetry is genuinely fine work. The legs are square in profile and topped with carved women finished in gold and silver bronze, while the lower portion of each leg is black-stained and polished. The interior of the case is veneered in birch, with blackened, polished edges. Under the keyboard sit three drawers with ebonized fronts — exactly what you'd expect to find on a sewing table, and presumably useful for needles, thread, and other sewing implements even with a piano hidden a few inches below.

Pulling out the keyboard

The mechanism for turning "table" into "piano" is a sliding keyboard frame: it draws out on runners using two brass rings as handles, and small wooden spring catches on either side lock it in the playing position once extended. The keyboard itself has bone-covered natural keys and dark-stained sharps, spans a compass of f to f³, and is fitted with Viennese action with box damping (Wiener Mechanik mit Kastendämpfung) — the light, fast action characteristic of Viennese pianos of the period, paired with a box-style damping mechanism.

The stringing runs on the diagonal inside the case, and the string cover is black lacquered. Two scaling measurements are recorded in the museum's technical documentation: a Stichmaß (a standard scale-length reference measurement) of 42 cm, and a Mensur (string length) at c² of 27.2 cm — figures that would matter to anyone trying to understand or reconstruct the instrument's stringing and tension.

The maker signed his work discreetly: set into the fascia board is a glass nameplate in a brass frame, reading simply "Joseph Klein // in // Wien."

Where to read more

The instrument has been published in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum's own exhibition literature: Wege in die Moderne. Weltausstellungen, Medien und Musik im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Jutta Zander-Seidel and Roland Prügel (exhibition catalogue, GNM, 2014), catalogue number 477 — a useful starting point if you want more context on where this piece sits within the broader nineteenth-century fashion for musical furniture.