Treasures of Buckingham Palace: Queen Victoria's Erard piano

In the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace is this very special grand piano made in the mid-1850s for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Queen Victoria had owned a piano that looked a little bit similar to this 20 years earlier, with a gilded case, gilt wood, with cherubs and monkeys playing tricks on each other, decorated all over the case. It's a type of decoration that was fashionable a century earlier, but it's something that she rather enjoyed and even her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, commented on her taste in piano cases. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were keen listeners and performers of piano music. They invited famous performers here to Buckingham Palace and their enjoyment of music was one of the reasons that the ballroom, which was also intended as a concert space, was extended onto the side of Buckingham Palace at this time. Even in her widowhood, which perhaps we might think of as melancholy and quiet, Queen Victoria enjoyed listening to music and enjoyed listening to especially her daughters and sometimes her sons performing in the afternoons and evenings. The grand piano is maintained in playable tuned condition and in fact it was very famously played at a BBC prom in 2019 when it travelled the furthest it's probably ever travelled in its life since it was delivered to the Royal Albert Hall in London where it was played by Stephen Hough. It's here in the white drawing room but originally would have been next door to me in the music room where it would have been enjoyed by the royal family.