Museum Collection together with the United Confectioners Holding presents a chocolate gramophone record with the recording of ‘Viennese Waltz’ by of Ralph Benatzky.

‘When we are short of words, chocolate can speak loudly about so many things,’
American writer Joan Baue. Museum Collection, together with the United Confectioners holding, turned to one of the most intriguing pages in the history of sound recording and produced a series of gramophone records made of chocolate mass. The small discs made of high-quality chocolate were used to record the melody of the ‘Phonoliszt-Violina Model B’ Orchestrion – ‘Viennese Waltz’ by composer Ralph Benatzky. You can see the process of reproducing the melody and listen to the waltz on the museum website in the section ‘Video Archive’.

Amazingly, chocolate music media are not a modern innovation. They were invented by Ludwig Stollwerck, owner of Germany's largest confectionery factory, successful entrepreneur and outstanding chocolatier, more than a hundred years ago. In the early 1900s, he met Thomas Edison and, having obtained the exclusive right to distribute phonographs in Germany, began to integrate them actively into his production. As early as 1903, Stollwerck produced miniature phonographs for children. These ‘toys’, which did not exceed 20 cm in height, were driven by a Gebruder Junghans A.G. clockwork, and the records were printed on round-shaped chocolates. As a rule, such phonographs were presented on holidays: at Christmas, Easter or on birthdays. When the child got tired of listening to the birthday tune, he could eat his sweet gift. This ingenious invention, advertised as ‘Stolwerck's talking chocolate’, became popular in Belgium and France. It spawned a wide range of toy gramophones designed to play lullabies, fairy tales, poems and educational material for children. However, by 1910, such devices began to go out of production which was due to the relative high cost of parts and frequent breakdowns of the mechanism, and soon disappeared altogether. Only a few of these fundamentally fragile turntables have survived to our days and are represented in the collections of technical museums in Europe and USA. Chocolate records from the early 20^th century have not survived.

The museum ‘Collection’ exposition features a Stollwerck gramophone designed for chocolates, as well as children's toy turntables made by ’Nirona’. Thanks to cooperation with United Confectioners, the Music Records section of the collection has been enriched with unparalleled chocolate gramophone records.

Cookery expert Christelle Le Ru writes, ‘memories of childhood, luxury, sweetness and sensuality– chocolate is not just a food, it's therapeutic.’
In this way, it is safe to assume that today museum Collection presents in its entirety a therapeutic, sentimental and unusual page in the history of sound recording – the history of chocolate music media and the devices for their reproduction.