One of the exhibits on display a the Tomsk History Museum is a grand piano, an essential element of any drawing room belonging to a wealthy household. Owning this musical instrument was viewed as par for the course. Tomsk merchants sought to acquire a grand piano for their staterooms by all the means they could.

The grand piano from our collection was produced by Fyodor Mühlbach’s (“F. Mühlbach”) company, which was rather famous in Russia between the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century. The history of the company began with a small workshop Fyodor Mikhailovich Mühlbach opened in the building on Ofitserskaya Street 3 in St. Petersburg in 1856. He came to St. Petersburg from Revel (present-day Tallinn, the capital of Estonia). Initially, Mühlbach worked as a craftsman, but once he managed to save enough money, he decided to start his own business.

At first, Mühlbach’s workshop only produced grand pianos. Materials were brought from abroad, while mechanical parts were manufactured in St. Petersburg, where the musical instruments were subsequently assembled, regulated and tuned. Upon its initial opening, the workshop only had three other workers besides its owner, but with time, the enterprise began to expand. In addition to grand pianos, the Mühlbach factory began to assemble upright pianos, reaching a total annual production of about fifty instruments. Furthermore, it offered quite a diverse range of products. Grand pianos were relatively cheap and were intended for studies, parlors, and concert halls. The instrument’s body was made of rosewood or walnut and was fitted with an English action and a seven-octave keyboard. They were sold in the building of the very factory they were produced in.

In the early 1880s, Mühlbach and his son acquired a plot of land located between the stations of the Fifth and Sixth companies of the Izmailovsky Regiment. There, they built a three-story factory building. Once their production facilities were relocated to the new premises, the factory began to develop at a rather rapid pace. In the last quarter of the 19th century, their grand and upright pianos received multiple top awards at various exhibitions, earning 16 medals, ten of which were gold. Mühlbach’s instruments were awarded the Grand Prize in Chicago in 1893, as well as a gold medal and the supreme title of ‘Purveyor to His Imperial Majesty’s Court’ at the 1896 All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, which granted the company the right to feature the coat of arms of Russia—the double-headed eagle—on its products. Their grand pianos were highly regarded by the famous Russian pianist Anna Yesipova, as well as a number of Polish musicians.