Qualla: Ringve Museum

Ringve Museum: Introduction

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ringve, CC BY-SA 3.0. Victoria Bachke fled the Russian Revolution and landed in Trondheim. Christian Anker Bachke had grown up on Ringve Farm, the childhood home of the Danish-Norwegian naval hero Peter Tordenskjold. They married in late 1919, had no children, and poured their considerable energies into assembling a collection of historical musical instruments that eventually numbered around 1,500 pieces. When Victoria opened the collection to the public in 1952, Ringve Museum was born -- Norway's national museum for music, housed in an 18th-century manor on the Lade peninsula with views across the Trondheimsfjord. The instruments she gathered still play. Guides -- often graduate music students -- perform on them during tours, filling period rooms with the sounds these objects were built to make.

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Image: Ringve | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ringve Museum: A Russian Emigre's Second Life

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ezzex, CC BY-SA 4.0. Victoria Rostin was an artist who escaped the upheaval of 1917 and eventually settled in Norway. Her marriage to Christian Bachke gave her both a home and a mission. Ringve Farm had history -- the first house on the site was built in 1521, and the current buildings date from the ...

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Image: Ezzex | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ringve Museum: Rooms That Play Themselves

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet, CC BY 2.0. The manor house exhibition is organized not by chronology but by composer. A Mozart room contains a spinet, a clavichord, and an 18th-century house organ beneath a Murano glass chandelier. The Beethoven room holds an 1870 harp piano by Dietz alongside the type of piano the compos...

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Image: NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet | CC BY 2.0

Ringve Museum: Four Centuries in a Barn

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet, CC BY 2.0. The Barn -- Museet pa Laven -- takes a broader view. One section traces four centuries of Western classical and popular music through objects: a Kirkman harpsichord from 1767, an Erberle viola d'amore from 1755, a five-octave Stein piano from 1783, a soprano saxophone made by Ado...

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Image: NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet | CC BY 2.0

Ringve Museum: Fire and Recovery

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Megaminxwin, CC BY 4.0. On August 3, 2015, fire tore through the manor's attic and second floor. The damage was severe -- a "nightmare," as one English-language headline put it. For a museum whose identity was built around irreplaceable historic instruments in period settings, the fire threatened not ju...

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Image: Megaminxwin | CC BY 4.0

Ringve Museum: The Garden That Surrounds the Music

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Mortel from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, CC BY 2.0. Ringve sits within 32 acres of botanical gardens run by NTNU, established in 1973. The gardens include an arboretum of Northern Hemisphere species arranged around a lake, a Renaissance herbal garden, a floral maze presenting perennial plants in systematic order, and the historica...

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Image: Richard Mortel from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | CC BY 2.0