The attachment was created by the Belgian organ builder Georges Cloetens, who first patented it on 28 January 1919 and named it the "Jeu de harpe tirée".[1] Maurice Ravel used it in Tzigane for violin and piano, and in the opera L'Enfant et les sortilèges.[1]
It generates a range of colours by adding two treble and two bass stops to a normal grand piano. These enable it to produce, in addition to the normal piano sound, additional timbres resembling cimbalom, harpsichord, and harp (or lute).[2]
The luthéal was, in Ravel's day, a comparatively new piano attachment that had several registrations that could be engaged by pulling stops above the keyboard. One of these registrations had a cimbalom-like sound, which fitted well with the gypsy-esque idea of Tzigane. The printed version of the original scores of that piece and L'Enfant et les sortilèges contained instructions for these register-changes during execution. The Luthéal, however, did not survive: by the end of the 20th century the first print of the luthéal version of the accompaniment was still at the publishers, but the chamber version of the piece had long been performed in Ravel's alternative specification for the ordinary piano.
A surviving original luthéal was discovered in storage in the museum of the Brussels Conservatory and has been restored[1] by Evert Snel from The Netherlands to playing condition.This instrument was sampled in 2011 so that its sounds are also available for music productions.[3] Evert Snel made a copy of the lutheal in a Fazioli grand piano.[citation needed] A new instrument was commissioned in 1987 by the French government on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Ravel's death, and is now in the Musée de la Musique, Paris.[1]