Some famous writers have played a woodwind instrument known as the flageolet: Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chalon, Samuel Pepys, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Composers such as Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel wrote pieces for it.
Musicians began to play this recorder-like instrument in the 1700s in France, and it began to be known as the French flageolet. The instrument is part of the fipple flute family, with four tone-holes on the front and two on the back.
Edward Coley Burne-Jones’s (1833–1898) “An Angel Plays a Flageolet” (1878) portrays a celestial being before an open window playing the instrument, as if she is playing for those outside her heavenly realm….