The Cat Piano: Historical Accounts, Illustrations and Myth

The “cat piano”, also called a cat organ or Katzenorgel, belongs to the unsettling borderland between musical history and historical storytelling. Accounts describe an imagined keyboard that would provoke cats into making sounds. The cruelty is part of the story; it should never be treated as a practical musical experiment.

What the early sources actually establish

William B. Ashworth Jr., writing for the Linda Hall Library, traces a description to Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis of 1650. He also identifies an illustration in Gaspar Schott’s Magia universalis naturae et artis, published in 1657–1659. These are evidence that the idea circulated in print. They are not, by themselves, evidence that a working instrument was constructed.

That distinction matters whenever an extraordinary invention appears in an old book. An author can report an anecdote, repeat another writer or illustrate a possibility without having witnessed it. A drawing may tell us a great deal about an idea’s appeal while telling us little about whether the pictured event occurred.

Three dates that should not be confused

The seventeenth-century accounts are separate from the later images often used to illustrate the story online. The German magazine Die Gartenlaube published an item titled “Katzen-Orgel” in 1858, issue 42, page 608; its text and scan are available through Wikisource. An illustration from that item must therefore be dated 1858, not 1657.

The image used at the top of this article is a different nineteenth-century illustration: Wikimedia Commons identifies it as coming from La Nature in 1883. The date of a reproduction, the date of a book and the supposed date of an invention answer different questions. Combining them produces a persuasive-looking but unreliable history.

How to read the story

For a music reader, the useful question is less “How could someone play this?” than “What does this source actually show?” Start with the publication and its date, then ask whether it names a witness or provides independent evidence. Repetition across websites does not turn a repeated anecdote into several separate confirmations.

The sources linked below document descriptions and illustrations. They do not establish a verified construction history. Presenting the cat organ as a documented concept, while acknowledging that limit, preserves the strange story without passing speculation off as fact.

Sources and image credit

William B. Ashworth Jr., “Gaspar Schott”, Linda Hall Library; “Katzen-Orgel”, Die Gartenlaube (1858), p. 608, transcription and scan via Wikisource.

Header image: La Nature (1883), via Wikimedia Commons, listed there as public domain.

Editorial correction, 30 October 2026: the previous version misdated the 1858 illustration and stated the construction question categorically. This revision distinguishes printed accounts from verified events.