Luthéal

The luthéal is a kind of hybrid piano which extended the "register" possibilities of a piano by producing cimbalon-like sounds in some registers, exploiting harmonics of the strings when pulling other register-stops, and also some registers making other objects, which were lowered just above the strings, resound. The instrument became obsolete partly because most of its mechanics were too sensitive, needing constant adjustment. The only pieces in the general repertoire to feature the luthéal are L'enfant et les sortilèges (1920–25) and Tzigane (1924) by Maurice Ravel.

The attachment was created by the Belgian organ builder Georges Cloetens, who first patented it on 28 January 1919 and named it the "Jeu de harpe tirée".Maurice Ravel used it in Tzigane for violin and piano, and in the opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges.

It generates a range of colours by adding two treble and two bass stops to a normal grand piano. These enable it to produce, in addition to the normal piano sound, additional timbres resembling cimbalom, harpsichord, and harp (or lute).

The luthéal was, in Ravel's day, a comparatively new piano attachment that had several registrations that could be engaged by pulling stops above the keyboard. One of these registrations had a cimbalom-like sound, which fitted well with the gypsy-esque idea of the composition. The printed version of the original score of the Tzigane piece contained instructions for these register-changes during execution. The Luthéal, however, did not survive: by the end of the 20th century the first print of the luthéal version of the accompaniment was still at the publishers, but the chamber version of the piece had long been performed in Ravel's alternative specification for the ordinary piano.

A surviving original luthéal was discovered in storage in the museum of the Brussels Conservatory and has been restored by Evert Snel from The Netherlands to playing condition. Evert Snel made a copy of the lutheal in a Fazioli grand piano. A new instrument was commissioned in 1987 by the French government on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Ravel’s death, and is now in the Musée de la Musique, Paris.

...
Wikipedia