How Notre Dame’s famed Grand Organ regained its distinctive voice

By Caroline Baum and Sérène Nourrison, CNN

Paris (CNN) — France’s largest musical instrument is ready to sound again.

It has taken months of painstaking cleaning and decontaminating of 8,000 pipes, 115 organ stops and numerous other musical components, but on Saturday the majestic tones of the Grand Organ of Notre Dame will ring out once more.

It will be the first time the revived instrument has been played in front of an audience since the Parisian landmark went up in flames more than five years ago.

Like the Virgin Mary statue that emerged from the blaze miraculously unscathed, the organ somehow managed to avoid significant damage in the April 2019 fire. It was structurally intact, but remnants of the collapsed lead roof filled its cavernous pipes and the cracks between its keys.

That thick, yellow powder posed no threat to the instrument’s machinery, but the dust needed to be removed for another reason: it was toxic to humans.

So, as with countless other centuries-old relics and architectural elements inside the cathedral, highly specialized craftspeople were required to get the organ back to its pre-fire form, or as close to it as possible.

Veteran organ builder Laurent Mesme’s company, Orgues Quoirin, was one of three workshops chosen from across France to restore the Grand Organ.

Mesme described the process as “incredible.”

“It was an exceptional worksite. Usually, the organ builder starts to work when everything is done,” he said. “Here, we had to work with the masons, the painters and all the other professionals on site.”

The restoration process involved more than 30 artisans who spent months dismantling the organ and restoring its electrical and mechanical components before the deep-clean. They were among more than 2,000 craftspeople in total to be involved in the cathedral’s restoration, many using traditional methods from generations ago, according to President Emmanuel Macron’s office.

Tuning the organ took another six months.

“This kind of maintenance, where you dismantle the entire organ, usually happens every 50 or 100 years,” Mesme said. “The next restoration isn’t going to happen any time soon.”

To tune an organ, one needs a perfect ear and, typically, complete silence, the latter of which proved nearly impossible to find on the highly specialized construction site.

To accommodate this, one team started tuning the pipes by day, while another team perfected the work through the night after construction teams had left.

These nocturnal artisans were assisted by the four organists of Notre Dame, each of whom was intimately acquainted with the unique character of the organ’s sound from years spent playing the instrument.

“It wasn’t possible any other way,” said organist Olivier Latry. “During the day it was impossible to do anything (with the noise).”

Latry had, in his words, lived with the organ “day and night” since joining the cathedral in 1985. He said it felt strange to spend so much time away from it after the fire.

“It’s really a very intimate bond that’s been established. And it’s funny, the fact that the organ has been out of commission for five years and we find it again, it’s a bit like finding an old friend we haven’t seen for a few years,” he told CNN.

Thanks to this collaboration between artisan and musician, the sound of the organ has been restored to exactly as it was before the fire, though it remains to be seen if the acoustics of the cathedral will match once the new furniture is added.

Latry and Notre Dame’s three other organists are set to play when the cathedral hosts its reopening ceremony on Saturday. The music for what organizers have dubbed the “grand awakening” of the organ will be improvised by the musician based on the emotion of the historic moment, according to Latry.

When they finally play, the artisans who restored the organ will have etched their own unique mark onto a piece of French history.

“Every time there has been a restoration, the organ builders have preserved what the previous organ builders have done. As a result, the organ is not the work of a single builder. It’s really a shared work that unfolds over three or four centuries,” Latry said.

“It’s a bit like this organ is the history of France,” he added.

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