Batch #303

Extract from the notice of the auction held on 5 October 1923 in the noble hall of the Geographical Society in Lisbon, which auctioned off the collection of artefacts linked to the monarchist counter-revolution of 1919.

Batch #303

Piano

Harmonium-Handlung, manufactured by José de Mello Abreu with address at 25, Rua do Cancella Velha, Porto.

Specimen in Swedish pine wood for the harmonic lid and keys, mahogany for the body and legs. It has a mechanism, adapted after the date of construction, invented by the José Delerue workshops (10, Campo da Regeneração), which allows the instrument to produce music autonomously, without the need for an instrumentalist, by means of a small ethyl ether combustion engine. The mechanism has a removable tine cylinder inside that allows the Charter Anthem to be played.

Average state of preservation, oxidised varnish and stains of what is presumed to be blood spatter on the wood. The piano emanates a faint odour of ‘funeral water’.

This piano (which consists of Batch #303 in its whole) was infamously played by Esmeralda Vilar at the Eden-Theatre, during the period when various Republican resistance fighters were imprisoned there, to drown out their screams while they were being tortured for information or malice. In this improvised prison, which operated for half a year before the prisoners were sent back to the Aljube (army officers) and the Casa de Reclusão (remaining political prisoners), the prisoners were kept in the dark under the stage where, between the gaps in the wooden boards, the blood of the flogged dripped like rain. From the cabins, some of the prisoners were forced to watch their colleagues being tortured, so that their spirits would break before their bodies did.

According to Campos Lima: ‘It was rumoured that, inside the Eden-Theatre, prisoners were shorn in mockery to the sound of the Charter Hymn, played on a piano that the ‘trauliteiros’[1] had found there. Sometimes, as a magnanimous gesture, they were allowed to choose the music to which they were to be beaten.’

Rocha Martins opposes this: ‘Esmeralda Vilar couldn’t do that… because she didn’t even know how to play the piano!’; but the existence of mechanism contradicts this thesis.

The Department’s records show frequent visits by Isabel Mendonça Travassos, bringing barrels of ‘funeral water’, which allowed the reduction of the recovery period, between beating sessions, of the republicans who were most resistant to saying what the royalists wanted to hear; the records also refer she would bring back trolleys with raw materials for the production of vinum liminis mortis.

Due to its unique character and incalculable historical value, Batch #303 has a base bid of 8,000$00.

[1] Pejorative term used to refer to monarchists during the Northern Monarchy revolution.