The Orphéal was a

keyboard instrument A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument played using a keyboard, a row of levers which are pressed by the fingers. The most common of these are the piano, organ, and various electronic keyboards, including synthesizers and digital piano ...

invented by the Belgian

Georges Cloetens Georges Cloetens, born Josse Léopold Cloetens on March 7, 1871 in Brussels and died on August 13, 1949 in Ixelles, was a Belgian organ builder and inventor, mainly known for the invention of the orphéal (1908) and the luthéal (1919). Biogra ...

in 1910. It appears to have been a combination of piano, organ and harmonium, capable of reproducing approximations of the sounds of the cello, horn, etc.Closson, Ernest.
Histoire du Piano
", p.58. ''PianoMajeur.net''. The only occasion that people these days are likely to come across its name is on the back of Durand editions of

Maurice Ravel Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In ...

's music, where an advertisement for Petit Poucet from Ma Mère l'Oye, arranged for Orphéal, still exists. Cloetens also invented the

Luthéal The luthéal is a kind of hybrid piano which extended the "register" possibilities of a piano by producing cimbalom-like sounds in some registers, exploiting harmonics of the strings when pulling other register-stops, and also some registers makin ...

, which Ravel used in two works,

Tzigane ''Tzigane'' is a rhapsodic composition by the French composer Maurice Ravel. It was commissioned by and dedicated to Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, great-niece of the influential violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim. The original instrumentati ...

and

L'Enfant et les Sortilèges ''L'enfant et les sortilèges: Fantaisie lyrique en deux parties'' (''The Child and the Spells: A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts'') is an opera in one act, with music by Maurice Ravel to a libretto by Colette. It is Ravel's second opera, his first be ...

References

External links

Reconstruction of the original Orphéal from Cloetens in the organ of Oudenaarde (Belgium)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Orpheal Keyboard instruments 1910 musical instruments Experimental musical instruments