In the corner of the parlor, the mahogany piano had long been silent. The lid was often closed, concealing dulled strings and moth-eaten felt. Should someone press a yellowed key, the sound was sour, almost haunted.

But with chairs still turned its way, it was easy to imagine the instrument in its prime, a fixture of William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Miss. His wife, Estelle, would play it frequently, as she had since she was a teenager. And family lore has it that one night, after Faulkner had told a story about a jilted bride, he spooked his family by arranging for a few bars of a Chopin waltz to be played on the piano and evoke her ghost.

Almost a century later, the piano is at the heart of a plan to kindle new interest in the family and the home, which was named Rowan Oak by Faulkner and is now part of the University of Mississippi’s museum system. The instrument was refurbished this summer, and on Thursday evening its fuller, back-in-tune notes rang through the parlor once again during a concert marking Faulkner’s birthday. Rowan Oak’s curators hope it will be the first of many such evenings.

The piano, a quarter grand made in 1916 by Chickering & Sons in Boston, was a gift to Estelle Oldham from her parents when she was a teenager.

Estelle Oldham and young Billy Falkner (he added the “u” to his last name later in life) were childhood sweethearts, but her family saw him as an eccentric high school dropout with little potential. The Oldhams were pleased when she got a marriage proposal from Cornell Franklin, a University of Mississippi graduate working in what was then the territory of Hawaii.

The piano was shipped to Hawaii after Estelle married him, and then to Shanghai after the couple moved there. But several years later Estelle and her two young children were back in Oxford, and the couple divorced.

In 1929, she married her old sweetheart — now William Faulkner, a published author — and had the piano shipped back to Mississippi. When Faulkner had earned enough from his novels to buy a rundown antebellum mansion in Oxford, they put it in the parlor.

It was a tumultuous marriage, marred by both spouses’ alcoholism, Faulkner’s chronic infidelity and his idiosyncrasies, which put him at odds with Oxford society. But she persisted at the piano, while he prowled around the house with a portable typewriter or, at one point, scribbled a narrative timeline onto an office wall.

“She made sure the piano was an important part of their lives,” Larry Wells, who married Faulkner’s niece, Dean, said of Estelle. “It has a bearing all its own, I think.”

Estelle Faulkner initially remained at Rowan Oak after her husband’s death in 1962, installing a previously forbidden air conditioning unit the day after the funeral. When she later moved to Virginia, she left the instrument behind.

Rowan Oak was first rented, then sold to the University of Mississippi, with Faulkner’s surviving family members insistent that it keep the unpolished feel of a lived-in home. The piano stayed.

The house sits in the woods on the edge of the university campus, its entrance flanked by Eastern red cedar trees. It draws about 15,000 visitors a year, a fraction of the number of fans who pack a single Ole Miss football game. Most are Faulkner devotees from around the world or tourists visiting Oxford.

Admission to Rowan Oak is just $5, cash only. Bill Griffith, the longtime curator, and Rachel Hudson, an assistant curator, are the only full-time employees.

The home is now part of the university’s museum system. But it has been challenging to pay for internal upkeep and to maintain its 33 acres of land — let alone to mount more ambitious exhibits, restore the grounds or hire more staff.

The curators, protective of the author, also worry about making Faulkner relevant and accessible to younger generations. “It can be a little taxing on the eyes and the brain,” Hudson acknowledged of Faulkner’s prose. She added, “I get unconvinced visitors all the time — ‘How the hell do I read this?’” (She encourages reading him comparatively alongside Toni Morrison — or aloud.)

Only recently could the curators even begin to contemplate restoring some of the Faulkners’ aging possessions. They were on loan from the Faulkner family until 2019, when a donation allowed the university to acquire them.

Bruce Levingston remembers gravitating toward the old piano when he was a child visiting Rowan Oak for the first time. When he returned decades later, as an acclaimed concert pianist, he finally got a chance to play it.

“It was magical,” he recalled. “It was the sense of so many layers of history overlapping and touching.”

But it was clear that the piano needed work, said Levingston, who holds multiple positions, including artist in residence at the University of Mississippi.

The keys made an unnatural clacking sound. Playing the instrument made him feel as if “there’s a yellow film over the sound.”

When he prodded Griffith, he learned that there was no funding set aside to restore artifacts. As he considered making his own donation, Levingston also started to notice other pieces in the home that could use similar work.

“The irony is we want them in their original state,” he said of the furnishings. “But to keep them in their original state, you have to do things in a modern way to preserve them.”

Levingston, tapping into a network of connections established over years of performing around the world, started raising money.

For the piano restoration, he tapped Brandon Lewis, a technician he had trusted to work on instruments in the past.

In April, on a day when no rain threatened, the piano was turned on its side and carefully transported to Lewis’s home in Pope, Miss. One day this summer, pieces of it were scattered around the studio he built in the house, which his grandparents once owned.

“They all have their own little personality — whether it’s their tone, whether it’s their appearance,” Lewis said of pianos. When repairing one, he added, “You kind of get to know it first. And then it kind of dictates to you what it wants done to it.”

In this case, the piano’s heart — the spruce soundboard that manages its vibrations — was in good shape. But it needed a new pinblock, to keep the strings at the correct tension. The damper felt was either moth eaten or virtually petrified. A piece of ivory on the middle C key needed to be glued back on. The wood needed refinishing.

“She’s a good old girl,” Lewis said, turning to scrub the smoke-stained ivory keys. A chicken ran by outside.

There was a balance between ensuring the instrument could be played again and not erasing its history, he added, noting, “A 100-year-old person isn’t going to have the beautiful teeth.”

Faulkner would have been 128 on Thursday. The piano is back at Rowan Oak, its keys gleaming, its lid propped open to show off shining copper-colored strings.

At the birthday concert, Levingston played the Chopin waltz that Faulkner accented his ghost story with and other pieces from the family’s collection of sheet music by composers including Mozart and Debussy.

The guest list — donors, university staff and Mississippi elite — grew too large for the home, which is not supposed to hold more than 40 people. So for most of the concert Levingston played outside on a different piano. Then he went inside and again began playing the restored Faulkner piano, as some people filtered through the home.

The music floated through the screened door.

A young woman, newly transplanted to Mississippi, lingered on the periphery of the woods to listen, promising to return. Some guests sheepishly marveled that it had been years — if ever — since they had stepped inside the house. A few students stepped inside for a minute to catch the sound of the refurbished piano.

The concert also celebrated a new endowment fund for object restoration, named after Levingston. In the last year, it has grown to more than $150,000 in donations, he said, with more to come in pledges.

The curators are feeling giddy, quick to show off the gleaming strings and logo inside.

“I just can’t believe it,” Griffith said of the piano’s transformation. “It’s remarkable.”

Standing in the parlor one recent afternoon, he turned to survey the room. Maybe the Japanese nesting tables would be next.