Read on to discover how the organ of Paris's Notre-Dame miraculously survived the flaming inferno of 2019...
April 2019... Notre-Dame is engulfed in flames...
The evening of 15 April 2019 is impossible to forget. Many around the globe, even with no personal attachment to Paris or Notre-Dame, watched in stunned disbelief as the city’s great medieval cathedral was engulfed in flames.
Though much of the world’s bad news now feels almost predictable, this disaster seemed to strike out of nowhere; people will always remember where they were when the news broke, especially, perhaps, if they were admirers of the famous organ in which so much of the building’s soul feels invested. But if the world felt heartbroken, imagine the emotions of those closely connected to Notre-Dame, above all the organists who not only play a starring role in its life, but spend more time than anyone else alone, communing with the building, practising when the rest of Paris is going to sleep.
Notre-Dame organists helplessly look on...
For Vincent Dubois, one of the titular organists of Notre-Dame de Paris, that night remains etched into his memory. But like many deeply affected by the event, he was not even in the city. ‘I was actually in my car in Strasbourg, where I live,’ he recalls when we meet in the organ loft at Notre-Dame in mid-April, almost exactly six years after the fire.
‘At the time I was the director of the Strasbourg Conservatoire and I was heading from the office to my house when I got a call from Johann Vexo, a choir organist here. I’ve known Johann for 25 years and I’d never heard his voice like that. I asked him what was wrong, and he said he’d just escaped from the organ loft – he’d been playing the service when flames and smoke were spotted, and the alarm was raised. He told me, “I can’t look at it; I’m going home, but you must switch on your TV.”
‘It was just horrible. I went extremely pale; I couldn’t believe what was happening and just had to hope that the walls were going to hold and that the organ would survive. I was really scared when I saw the flames spreading to the towers, because if the bells had fallen down, everything would have collapsed. We organists were on the phone to each other all night, talking and seeing who had the latest news. It felt very personal – like seeing the closest member of your family burning right next to you and being unable to do anything – because the cathedral and this organ belong to my life.’
Miraculously, the Notre-Dame organ is largely unscathed...
Dubois has now made the first recording on the restored grand organ, an Erato release under the title Notre-Dame de Paris: Organ (out 5 September). Perhaps the only piece of good news to have come out of Notre-Dame in the aftermath of that fateful night was the discovery that the organ had survived the fire almost unscathed – but it still needed to be dismantled and cleaned and was put back only in time for last winter’s reopening ceremonies.
‘It was a miracle. We found just 20 centimetres of water on a corner of the console.’ The choir organ was less lucky; indeed, it was destroyed in the fire but had been of much less historic or musical significance and, until its replacement is installed in 2028, a digital organ is standing in.
How does the newly restored organ sound now?
Does the restored instrument sound or feel different to Dubois? ‘The sound of the high pitches has changed – they are brighter now. The big bass stops are clearer too. Because every surface in the cathedral has been cleaned we have won two seconds of acoustics when the cathedral is full – the reverberation is about four to five seconds, when before it was just two to three. When it’s empty, it’s about the same, like eight seconds.’
All this affects his interpretations and choice of registrations. ‘We have to be more careful now about using the high mutations – you know, the Septième, the Larigot and so on. Also the mixtures high and low – we should reduce our use of them a little.’
A new album recorded on the restored Notre-Dame organ
Appointed in 2016 as one of three titular organists, Dubois has been in post for nine years, but between fire and plague (Covid) those years have not gone as originally envisaged, and some artistic plans have had to be revised or delayed. The duty of playing for services continued largely uninterrupted, since Notre-Dame moved its regular services across the river to Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, and Dubois worked there alongside his titular colleagues Olivier Latry and Philippe Lefebvre. ‘We officially became adjunct organists of the titulaire, Michael Matthes. A very nice guy – we enjoyed a great connection with him and have stayed close friends.’
Celebrating the past organists of Notre-Dame
Some of Dubois’s recording plans have had to be rescheduled, but this new release has of course been a priority. Its programme (unrelated to the music he played during the reopening service and concert) has been carefully designed to celebrate not only the organ but some of Notre-Dame’s past organists. Naturally, most of the music is French, and though Bach is included there is even a French connection here – to the Alsatian polymath, organist and Bach scholar Albert Schweitzer, born 150 years ago and a pupil and friend of Charles-Marie Widor, also featured with his famous Toccata. César Franck is here not only for his own music but as the teacher of one of Notre-Dame’s greatest incumbents, Louis Vierne.
Ravel, Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov
Another 1875 birthday boy, Maurice Ravel, is celebrated through Dubois’s own transcription of three movements from Le Tombeau de Couperin. ‘I did it last year, directly from the piano score and, of course, only of those movements I thought would work – the “Rigaudon”, “Menuet” and “Toccata”. These all have strong rhythmical ideas, and the organ has a sort of percussive quality well suited to this.’
The tradition of Notre-Dame organists is traced here, beginning with the Marche des Marseillois et l’Air Ça ira by Marie-Antoinette’s teacher Claude Balbastre, who survived the Revolution by playing its hymns and songs. Three successive 20th-century figures are similarly represented: Vierne, with his arrangement of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor; Léonce de Saint-Martin with his version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee; and Pierre Cochereau, whose Boléro sur un thème de Charles Racquet commemorates a Notre-Dame organist-composer of the 17th century.
A look back through history....
‘So there are, let’s say, compartments in this recording,’ explains Dubois. ‘And one of them has to do with the organists here right across history. It’s “intemporal” – I don’t know the exact word in English for being outside of one time or era – and to do with what I’d call the universal repertoire of the organ.’ The same is true of the organ itself, based on pipes by François Thierry dating from before the Revolution but expanded and transformed in the 1860s by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (see left) into the formidable instrument we know today.
Dubois, Latry and Escaich... the three titular organists of Notre-Dame
Notre-Dame and its organ were a beacon for Dubois already in childhood, when his mother bought him recordings made there by Cochereau. It was his first teacher, organist of the cathedral in his hometown of Saint-Brieuc on the north coast of Brittany, who in the mid-1990s arranged for the then-teenager to meet Cochereau’s successor, Lefebvre. ‘Philippe allowed me to play some pieces after the Saturday service. I was in such a state of shock that I couldn’t eat for a week.’
Becoming a student of Latry at the Paris Conservatoire further deepened his connection with Notre-Dame, but even after winning two major competitions in 2002 – Calgary and Toulouse – and embarking on an international career, he had to go through a gruelling audition process to win the post he now shares with Latry and Thierry Escaich, recently appointed after Lefebvre’s retirement. Two years ago, Dubois was also appointed professor of organ interpretation and improvisation at the Hochschule für Musik in Saarbrücken.
The Notre-Dame organ sounds better than ever!
A few hours after our interview, I return to Notre-Dame for a late-night climb to the organ loft – it’s only after the cathedral’s closure at night that the organ can be played without restrictions. Whether improvising or playing the most challenging repertoire from memory, Dubois exudes musicianship rare among organists – hands and feet flying with a flexibility that truly moulds the music.
Looking out over the nave of the cathedral, the console – east-facing so that the organist is on an equal footing with the celebrant – may resemble a flight deck, but with Dubois at the controls it is anything but a machine. When we say au revoir sometime after midnight, he stays on alone to practise in a building where peace feels once again timelessly restored.