Nine thousand instruments and works of art, and not one of them is mute. The Musée de la musique of the Philharmonie de Paris, at the north-eastern edge of the city, inside the parc de la Villette, stays out of every list of artworks to see in Paris. It holds one of the greatest instrument collections in the world and it has an advantage that instrument museums almost never have: there are musicians playing in the rooms every day.
From Tuesday to Friday the museum opens at midday, not in the morning, and only on Saturday and Sunday at 10:00: it is the timetable that catches out more people than any other in Paris. It closes on Mondays, and under-26s go in free, with no conditions attached.
Whose is the gilded harp in one of the cases?
Let’s go!
1. A new display since 14 May 2025
The museum you will visit is less than two years old. The permanent display was inaugurated on 14 May 2025, for the thirtieth anniversary of the Cité de la musique, and it is the first rehang since 2009: it is called Des musiques et des mondes and it is completely unlike the one before. It covers a history of music in the world that runs from the end of the sixteenth century to today.
The idea holding it together comes from Édouard Glissant’s «Tout-monde», and in practice it means one thing: European and non-European heritages are no longer kept apart. Before, there were the rooms of Western music and, at the far end, the section of «instruments of the world». Now a baroque lute and a Chinese zither can stand in the same case because they answer the same question.
There are six sections: Polyphonie, Musique et pouvoir, L’imaginaire des Lumières, L’Empire de la musique, where the Stradivari are gathered, Explorer l’inouï and Des musiques et des mondes. The display design is by the Projectiles practice, the same one that will redo the museum of the Institut du monde arabe.
Read also: Institut du monde arabe: 7 works to see before the museum closes
2. Harpsichord E.1, with a date painted on an added piece
The instrument in the photograph at the top carries the inventory number E.1, and it is a two-manual harpsichord by Ioannes Ruckers, built in Antwerp and with the date 1612 painted on it.
The raised lid is filled by a painting, Orpheus charming the animals, and on the inner flap is the musical duel between Apollo and Marsyas. Along the sides run more panels with figures in a landscape. Below, the case rests on a gilded rococo stand, with curved legs and carved shells, which has nothing to do with Antwerp or with 1612.
And this is the point. In the eighteenth century France practised ravalement, which meant taking a Flemish instrument of the previous century, widening its keyboard, rebuilding its action and repainting it to the taste of the day. This harpsichord went through that treatment, and it is the reason you will find it catalogued sometimes as Flemish and sometimes as French.
There is a detail the museum does not hide: the date 1612 is painted on a piece of wood added during the work, not on the original material. So the catalogue entry writes it with a question mark. It is an object that declares its own uncertainty, and that is rare.
3. The guitar with two signatures on the soundboard
How often will you see an object signed by both the musicians who owned it?
The inventory number is E.375, the maker is the Parisian Jean-Nicolas Grobert and the guitar dates from around 1830.
On the soundboard, either side of the bridge, there are two signatures in ink. One is by Niccolò Paganini, who was not only the violinist of the century but also a guitarist and a composer of guitar music, and who stayed in Paris several times between 1831 and 1838. The other is by Hector Berlioz, who played the guitar and admired Paganini beyond measure.
The exact circumstances in which the two of them signed the same instrument are not known, and it is right to say so. What is known is how things ended between them, and it is worth telling in front of the case. On 16 December 1838, at the Conservatoire, Berlioz conducted the Symphonie fantastique and Harold en Italie, the symphony he had written at Paganini’s own request and which the violinist was hearing for the first time. When the concert ended Paganini knelt in front of him, in public, and two days later sent him a letter with twenty thousand francs, which cleared Berlioz of his debts and allowed him to write Roméo et Juliette. Berlioz gave the guitar in 1866 to the Musée instrumental du Conservatoire, the ancestor of this museum.
4. The Érard harp, and the three letters nobody reads
Let’s go back to the question at the start. The museum’s gilded harp is an Érard built for the Vienna Universal Exposition of 1873, in Louis XVI style, and it carries the engraved wording «Erard, par brevet d’invention n° 1752».
In the photograph you can see the row of brass discs lined up along the neck. This is the double action Sébastien Érard patented in 1810, the mechanism that makes the harp fully chromatic: each pedal, pressed halfway or all the way down, shortens the string by one semitone or two, so every note can sound flat, natural or sharp. Notice the red string among the others as well: by convention red marks the Cs and black the Fs, and those two colours are the only way a harpist can find their bearings at speed among dozens of otherwise identical strings.
Now the part that changes everything. The museum label carries the letters M.N.R., which stand for Musées Nationaux Récupération, and the deposit number OAR 240. It means this harp is a work recovered after the Second World War whose owner has never been found.
Its history can be reconstructed like this: bought from the house of Érard in April 1874 by count Joseph de Montbron, a musician and composer, it stayed in the family until the early twentieth century. It reappeared on the Paris market in 1940-1941, when it was bought by Friedrich Welz, an Austrian dealer close to the Nazi regime. At the end of the war American troops found it in Germany among the seized cultural property, and it was brought back to France. On 9 April 1973 it was deposited at the museum of the Conservatoire.
When you look at it, keep this in mind: it is not on show like the other instruments in the room. It is waiting, and the letters on the label are a request for restitution that has gone unanswered for eighty years.
5. The trumpets with no valves
In the same area you will find two baroque trumpets by Johann Wilhelm Haas, made in Nuremberg in 1671.
Follow the tube along its whole length and look for the valves. There are none. The natural trumpet is a folded tube and nothing else, and the player gets the notes with his lips alone, climbing up the harmonic series. The notes that lie close together, the ones that let you play a melody, are only found in the high register.
It is the technical reason the trumpet parts of Bach and his contemporaries run so high and are so feared: it is not a choice of colour, it is the only place on the instrument where a melody could be played. Valves would not arrive until the nineteenth century.
The ferrules with their rope moulding along the tube and the chased bell say the other thing: in Nuremberg the trumpet was a prestige object as well, and the Haas family were one of the best-known dynasties of makers in Europe.
6. The rudra vina, which is not in an exotic room
Where would you put an Indian zither in a European museum?
Until yesterday, at the far end, in the section of «instruments of the world». The new display has stopped doing that, and a rudra vina like the one below can appear beside the Western instruments that raise the same problems.
The instrument is a wooden tube painted in zigzags along which run some twenty tall curved frets, with two large gourds hanging beneath as resonators, decorated in a radiating pattern. The gourds are not an ornament: they are the sound box, and the instrument is played held diagonally, with one of the two resting on the shoulder.
Stop and compare it with the European string instruments in the same case. The question the makers asked themselves is the same, how to amplify a stretched string, and the answers are two different worlds: hollowed wood on one side, a dried gourd on the other.
7. How you really listen
Two things are worth more than any case, and both are included in the ticket.
The first is the free visioguide, available in French, English, Spanish and sign language, which lets you hear the sound of the instruments you are looking at. The second is the musician the museum puts in the galleries every day: they play, they talk about their own instrument and they answer whoever stops. Turning a corner you will come upon one of them at work, and at that point the collection stops being a row of objects in a case. On Sunday afternoons there are walking concerts and stories told in music.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 September 2026 on the official site philharmoniedeparis.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. Full price costs 10 euros and covers the permanent display and the visioguide. The reduced rate costs 8 euros and applies to young people from 26 to 28 inclusive, to anyone holding a concert ticket for the current season, to groups of 10 people and over and to teachers in music schools. Philharmonie subscribers pay 7 euros. Opening hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Friday 12:00-18:00 and Saturday and Sunday 10:00-18:00. It stays closed on Mondays. Announced exceptional closures. The museum closes on 25 December 2026 and on 1 January and 1 May 2027. Free admission. Under-26s go in free, and with them holders of the Pass éducation, of the CCIPJ press card, of the carte Culture, of the ICOM card or of a licensed guide’s card, plus jobseekers, people on minimum social benefits, the Amis de la Philharmonie and disabled visitors with their companion. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is included in the pass. Luggage. Under the Vigipirate plan luggage and travel bags are not allowed in, and they cannot be left in the cloakroom either: turn up at the checks in good time. Getting there. The address is 221 avenue Jean-Jaurès, in the nineteenth. Get off at Porte de Pantin on line 5, or take tram 3B and get off at the same stop. How long it takes. Allow two hours for the full display, an hour and a half if you skip the non-European sections. With a concert booked the same evening, the day at la Villette closes by itself.
Where to go from here
The objects in which you see the craft before the art are gathered by another Paris museum, the Musée des Arts et Métiers, where the machines are displayed on the same logic as these instruments. For decorative art applied to everyday objects, the place is the Musée des Arts décoratifs.
Non-European collections told without the exotic showcase are the speciality of two other museums in the city, the Musée du quai Branly and the Musée Guimet.
Photo credits: harpsichord by Ratigan (CC BY-SA 3.0), from Wikimedia Commons; Érard harp by Vassil (CC BY-SA 4.0); rudra vina by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); baroque trumpets by BenP (CC BY 2.5); Grobert guitar, Musée de la musique, public domain.
