Standing in the Rüdesheim Music Museum, I felt like a kid again, filled with wonder and excitement. A colorful fairground organ came to life, playing breathy melodies and featuring exotic moving figures.

Everyone on our Rhine Cruise tour seemed to share the same feeling. We even sang along to an old gramophone record, “When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, what would I be?”

The Rüdesheim Music Museum is located in the charming old manor house, the Brömserhof, which dates back to the 15th century. Outside, there was a vintage car where we took some photos.

The museum was founded by Siegfried Wendel, a German collector who gathered a vast collection of mechanical musical instruments. He initially opened the museum in the 1960s in Hochheim am Main but later moved it to Rüdesheim as the collection grew too large.

The museum features around 350 self-playing musical instruments and can only be visited through a 45-minute guided tour. Our guide shared the history of many instruments and demonstrated how they worked. We saw how old punch cards were used to play songs and learned that the gramophone needle had to be changed each time to avoid damaging the record.

Our tour included vibrant fairground organs, a sophisticated mechanical piano topped with violins, a ghostly self-playing piano, and tiny musical boxes with trilling birds. Reproductions of these musical boxes were available in the museum shop for about €2000.

The museum is open from March to December, 10 am to 6 pm, and you need to join a tour to see the instruments in action. The entrance fee is €10 for adults and €5 for children.

After the museum visit, you can stroll down the narrow Drosselgasse, a lane filled with inns and wine houses where you can sample local Rhine wines. We enjoyed a Rüdesheim coffee, which is laced with Asbach brandy and topped with whipped cream.

For more details about the Rüdesheim Music Museum, you can visit the Siegfried’s Mechanical Music Cabinet website.