The sound of music lives on
Notre Dame musicians rejoice that cathedral’s organ was spared
On the evening of April 15, Olivier Latry, one of the world’s greatest organists, arrived at a hotel in Vienna before a planned concert.
“I had just put my luggage down and received a text,” he said in a telephone interview. “It was from a friend, and it just said, ‘Notre Dame is burning!’ and there was a picture of the roof on fire.”
“I could not believe it, of course,” he added. “But then a second picture arrived ...” He trailed off. “It was like a bad dream.”
A day earlier, Latry — one of the three main organists at Notre Dame — had played the cathedral’s Grand Organ on Palm Sunday. It had been a beautiful service, he said, especially the moment when, according to tradition, a priest knocked on the cathedral’s door with his processional cross and demanded to be let in.
As the cathedral’s doors opened, Latry recalled, he let the organ’s full volume swell, sending its musical colours reverberating around the Gothic building. “It sounded like Christ was entering the cathedral,” Latry said. “It was such a moving moment. I didn’t know it would be my last time.”
But Latry, talking the day after the fire, was speaking too soon. On Tuesday, he was told that the organ was safe, albeit covered in dust. It may not sound exactly the same again, however, depending on how the cathedral is rebuilt.
Renée Louprette, an organist at Rutgers University in New Jersey who played as a guest at Notre Dame in December, said in a telephone interview that the acoustics of the building were vital to the organ’s much-admired sound.
“When they rebuild, I hope the sound’s just as impressive, but it will be different,” she said.
After the fire that devastated Notre Dame April 15, politicians, religious leaders and architects all paid tribute to the building, and tried to convey how important it was to France, to Europe and to the world. But the devastation was also acutely felt by the people who worked at the cathedral, not least its three organists — Latry, 57; Vincent Dubois, 38; and Philippe Lefebvre, 70. All of them were outside Paris at the time of the fire, watching on television as the cathedral burned and wondering what might be the fate of their instrument.
“All I could do was watch,” Dubois said in a telephone interview. “It was just impossible. You cannot do anything. You are powerless.”
The Grand Organ was one of Notre Dame’s most important objects, with five keyboards and almost 8,000 pipes. It traces its origins to the 1400s, though the current organ is mainly from 1868 and had been added to and improved many times.
It was “the most sumptuous example of France’s greatest contribution to the organ world,” wrote John Rockwell in The New York Times in 1992, after the instrument had completed a 30-month, multimilliondollar restoration.
The Grand Organ, like Notre Dame itself, has witnessed some of France’s most momentous events. During the French Revolution, many organs in the country were vandalized by revolutionaries who took the pipes and melted them down to make bullets. But Notre Dame’s survived with only some of its decorative elements removed (Dubois said that was because the organist at the time played “La Marseillaise” for the revolutionaries a lot).
In 1937, Louis Vierne, the cathedral’s organist for 37 years and a renowned composer who was also almost blind, died in the middle of a recital.
The Grand Organ also survived the Second World War, and it has been heard at numerous noteworthy Masses, including in November 2015, when Latry improvised an austere and powerful version of “La Marseillaise” at a memorial for victims of the Paris terror attacks.
Latry said he could not objectively comment on whether the Grand Organ was the best in the world. “But for sure, it’s, for me, the most transcendent,” he said. “It’s superlative.”
“When you play the organ, the stones are singing,” Lefebvre said in a telephone interview. He said that he had first heard the organ when he was 14, visiting Paris on vacation with his parents. They went to the cathedral and an organist happened to be playing, he remembered. “I was not so religious, but it was the most beautiful sound I’d heard in my life,” he said.
One of the reasons the organ is so impressive is that it has been renovated repeatedly, Dubois said, noting that every great French organ builder had worked on it and modernized it using the best technology, including adding electronics. “The synthesis of all that work is just a miracle,” he added.
Dubois said he remembers every detail about the first time he played the organ, age 16. He wore green velour pants, he said, and a blue, V-neck pullover. “I didn’t eat, as I was nervous,” he added. “And I didn’t eat for a few days after, as I was so shocked by it, in a good way.”
“Once you play it, it’s part of your body, of your mind and your soul,” he added. “I still get the same sensations today.”
The organ loft at Notre Dame is 84 steps above the cathedral’s entrance. It survived the fire with only minor damage thanks to being at the front of the cathedral beneath a stone roof, rather than beneath the 800-year-old wooden one that covered most of the building. And the roof above the organ is sloped, which meant water from firefighters’ hoses ran off it and also protected the instrument.
After the fire, Lefebvre said that he had felt lost because he did not know how long it would be until he could play the Grand Organ again. “I don’t know what I will do now,” he said. “I will do concerts elsewhere, I suppose, but that is so different to Notre Dame.”
But in a phone call Wednesday morning, having learned that the instrument would survive, he sounded almost ecstatic. “The organ only needs to be cleaned and tuned,” he said. “In maybe three, four years, we can reopen the church and play again.” Technicians would play it soon, once electricity was restored to the church, he said.
“It’s a miracle. Amazing. Incredible,” Lefebvre added, when asked for a word to describe how he felt. Then he laughed, a sound full of joy.