Music Museum

The Music Museum (in portuguese, Museu da Música) is under the auspices of the Direção-Geral do Património Cultural¹, an entity of the Portuguese State. It was inaugurated on the July 26^th of 1994 and holds the particularity of being located in a subway station of Lisboa, named Alto dos Moinhos.

The museum's beginnings make us go back to 1911, when the musicologist Michel'angelo Lambertini, begun to gather together musical instruments and other items inherent to the music world, like music sheets and scores.

Annoyed by the inertia of state agencies to grant specific support for his demand of creating a museum, Lambertini resorts to the collector Carvalho Monteiro. This last one, provided facilities and purchased the collections of Lambertini and Alfred Keil (author of A Portuguesa², the national anthem of Portugal), joining them to his own. It was reunited a powerful musical collection that held more than 500 pieces. However, only in 1946 the museum would open to the public and become official.

In the following decades, the collection of the museum wandered from place to place (almost like a discomfort the no one knew where to put in), and, in 1994 is accomplished its definitive address. Lambertini, wherever he might be, could finally smile. The music had found a place where could be appreciated in the splendor of all its history.

Inaugurated in 1994, the Museu da Música was born from the encounter between the Instituto Português dos Museus and the Metropolitano giving shape to a plan by musicologist Michel'angelo Lambertini, which date back to 1911. It assembles an important collection of more than one thousand music-related objects, covering four centuries of instrumental handicraft, beyond a rich treasure of iconography and documents.

Translation references

1. Directorate General of Cultural Heritage
2. The Portuguese