Queen Victoria, vivacious

England’s Queen Victoria is most often remembered as a dour, elderly widow whose long reign came to symbolize steadfastness and middle-class sensibility.

Now Buckingham Palace is showing a different side of the monarch as part of a special exhibition that opens today on the role music has played for more than 250 years in the palace. The exhibition reveals the queen as a vivacious young woman who loved to dance.

“I have been dancing till past four o’clock in the morning,” the 18-year-old Victoria wrote in her diary after a party in 1838 to celebrate her upcoming coronation.

Another highlight of the exhibition, which runs through Sept. 26, is an Erard grand piano, densely but delicately painted with musical cupids and monkeys, that was bought by Queen Victoria in 1856.