From where I sit
Olivier Latry on the evolution of Notre Dame’s legendary organ
‘We were all so happy that the organ appeared to have been saved from the fire and water that we were probably too happy. The cathedral is currently without any windows, so the humidity is very high and the organ has probably been damaged by acidic dust and melted lead. And we don’t yet know how dangerous all of that is and indeed what needs to be done to the organ. We hope not too much, but we’ll certainly have to remove the pipes to clean them. During its restoration five years ago the organ reached some kind of perfection – I hope we will recover this perfection in the repair.
‘The orgue de choeur is still there, but it’s not possible to enter the chancel, so we don’t know whether the organ will be playable. It received a lot of water, but the pipes are still there. In fact the heat in the cathedral was not that high – the roof fell down into the nave and made a huge hole so that the heat could escape. That saved a lot of things in the cathedral.
‘The main organ is not just a Cavaillé-coll. Of course, it existed before Cavaillé-coll – the builder kept most of the Clicquot pipes and didn’t revoice many of them, especially the reeds. But in the 20th century, the organ was modified by Pierre Cochereau and it started to evolve and open up to different kinds of repertoire.
‘During the last restoration in 2013 we added some stops required by the composer Jean-louis Florentz. His ideal organ was the organ of Notre Dame, but he died in 2004 so the stops came after the music. This is how it works at Notre Dame – this is why this organ is so special. It’s a universal organ in some ways. A transcendental organ. There is no other like it anywhere else in the world.
‘A lot of our playing at Notre Dame is improvised. We could play written music, of course, but everything has to be timed to the second, so we just improvise in the style of a composer and finish exactly when we have to. Improvisation is normal in Paris – in the 19th century all Paris Conservatoire students concluded their studies by improvising. The harmony teacher at the Conservatoire introduced Messiaen to Marcel Dupré simply for improvisation lessons – and this is how Messiaen became an organist.’ Olivier Latry’s latest recording Bach to the Future is out now on La Dolce Volta (LDV 69); Latry plays at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival on 28 July, and at the BBC Proms on 4 August.