Notre-Dame Cathedral - the organ reverberates again

I can still remember quite vividly my first visit to Notre-Dame on a school trip to Paris in 1963. The exterior looked stunning as we walked up to the West Door but the very gloomy interior of the cathedral came as quite a shock. Despite that I have visited the cathedral during most of my visits to Paris on business - there is something very special about the cathedral.

Equally vivid is my memory of watching the fire taking hold of the cathedral in April 2019. I’m sure I was not the only onlooker who was very concerned about the impact of the fire on the organ. It was some days before it became clear that the organ was structurally intact though affected by the water sprays and atmospheric particles of lead and stone dust.

As the first pictures emerged over the last few weeks of the interior of Notre-Dame the transformation was almost unbelievable. There had been a few videos released of the work being carried out on the renovation of the organ but with little detail.

The rededication of Notre-Dame on 7 December was not unexpectedly streamed on a number of YouTube channels. The organ did not figure at all in the initial stages of the service but then came the Benediction of the organ in a quasi alternim sequence of prayers and improvisations on the organ. If you watch the France 24 streaming channel the Benediction starts around 2hrs 15mins in. Until the start of the Benediction the organ was in darkness. Then the organ is suddenly illuminated and the pipes shine brightly for the first time in many years.

Despite having many recordings of the organ, and indeed having sat up in the gallery for a recital, nothing prepared me for the impact of the first of eight improvisations played by Olivier Latry. I don’t think that any in the congregation were prepared either judging from the somewhat astonished faces on the television screen. There was of course no music on the organ music desk, just the text of the benedictions.

All four of the current team of organists took their turn on the organ bench. The camera gave a good view of the console and the cathedral, but I could not identify which of the organists were playing each of the improvisations. I was slightly surprised that the Final was also an improvisation – it might have been appropriate to have played the concluding movement of one of Vierne’s Symphonies given the effort he put in during his tenure as organist to gain financial support for the maintenance and enlargement of the organ. Vierne died at the console on 2 June 1937.

However the improvisations give a good sense of what the congregation at services at Notre-Dame would have experienced with Pierre Cochereau at the console. And to be fair, the recitals in January feature the 3rd and 6th of Vierne’s Symphonies.

The following day there was the first Mass in Notre-Dame since the fire. The organ again played an important role, and it was of considerable interest to hear improvisations in the context of the service, rather than as an element in a recital. You could hear the organist picking up the theme from the plainsong chants and using them to form the basis of the improvisation.

I’m looking forward to hearing the first recordings of the organ and judging the impact of the cleaning of both the building and the organ on the sound of the instrument, especially on the reverberation period. Along with the physical rebuilding of the cathedral the opportunity was taken to investigate many aspects of the construction of the cathedral over the period from 1260. The January/February 2024 issue of the Journal of Cultural Studies is a special issue devoted to research on Notre-Dame. This issue is open access so the papers can be downloaded at no cost.

Of particular interest to me is a paper entitled ‘Ears of the past, an inquiry into the sonic memory of the acoustics of Notre-Dame before the fire of 2019’. Sabine’s law states that the reverberation time of a room is proportional to its volume, and inversely proportional to the surface area of its walls weighted by their absorption properties. Notre-Dame has a very significant reverberation time, on the order of 9 seconds for the lowest frequency bands in the absence of an audience. Reverberation is also a function of frequency and in the case of Notre-Dame the reverberation time at 1000Hz is only 6.4 seconds. The effect of cleaning all the stonework will inevitably have a significant impact on the ‘sound’ of the organ.

Next up are the recitals in February on the renovated organ in St. John the Divine, New York, a casualty of a fire in the cathedral in April 2019, though it was first used for a service on 1 December.