Musical and Mechanical Genius in our Historic Organ

by Nancy Janin

Published in Trinité Magazine, Fall 2022

Among the many legacies left to us by our generous founders, the historic Cavaillé-Coll organ is one of the greatest. On any given Sunday, the congregation is blessed by its beautiful and powerful sound, without knowing why it is so fine, or to whom we owe the joy. The answer is the pure and prolific genius of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899).

Paris Conservatory organ professor Charles-Marie Widor, his contemporary, described the innovation and brilliance of a Cavaillé-Coll organ: “[…] the freedom of mixing timbres, the means of intensifying them or gradually tempering them, the freedom of tempos, the sureness of attacks, the balance of contrasts, and, finally, a whole blossoming of wonderful colors—a rich palette of the most diverse shades: harmonic flutes, gambas, bassoons, English horns, trumpets, celestes, flue stops and reed stops of a quality and variety unknown before.”[1]

Cavaillé-Coll’s innovations in organ design revolutionized organ playing and composition, leading to an entirely new type of organ music. He built more than 600 instruments in in 32 countries, that affirm his influence far beyond his native France. In Paris, Cavaillé-Coll organs grace the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Basilica of St. Denis, the churches of St. Roch, Madeleine, St. Sulpice and Notre-Dame d’Auteuil, as well as the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.

Born to an organ-building family in Montpellier, Cavaillé-Coll showed mechanical talent early on. By 1822, at age 11, he was working alongside his father and two brothers in the family atelier in Toulouse with miniature tools to fit his small hands, and by 14 he was formally an apprentice. His curious mind and exceptional intelligence led him to also study informally with local mathematicians. At age 22, he created a circular saw, and won a national prize for it.

By 1829, 18-year-old Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was sent alone to Lerida in Spain to complete a half-built organ. This was the first time he had the freedom to showcase his own talents and creativity and the organ was considered a triumph, especially his inclusion of the new-fangled swell box, which allows the organist to create crescendos and decrescendos of tone. Back in Toulouse, he met Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini, who with many Parisians had fled the city due to a cholera outbreak. Rossini was looking for an organ for an opera production and contacted the upcoming local organ builder Cavaillé-Coll offered one of his own inventions, a “Poikilorgue”, a precursor to the harmonium used in salons and theaters. Whether it was the instrument or the young man himself that impressed Rossini, he persuaded Cavaillé-Coll to move to Paris, where organs were being built by the dozens. Further, he provided letters of introduction that put Aristide in touch with all the cultural impresarios in the capital.

Thanks to one of those contacts, a few days after he arrived in 1833, he heard about a prestigious project to design an organ for the Basilica of St. Denis; the only problem was that the bidding period was closing in three days. Cavaillé-Coll rushed to the site, drew up a plan, and just before the deadline delivered his proposal. It was accepted over all the other big organ makers; his design’s many innovations had impressed the powers that be.

For the St. Denis organ, Cavaillé-Coll redesigned the bellows, which he believed were the most important element of organ construction. Rather than pinched on one side, opening fully only on the other, he created box bellows that pushed the air out more evenly and efficiently. This new design could be more easily worked by teams of bellow blowers, stepping up and down on protruding struts under the bellows (picture a row of Stairclimbers in a gym). Cavaillé-Coll also came up with a genius solution to the difficulties of varying the bellows’ pressure on pipes of differing lengths and widths. Those sounding higher frequencies need a higher pressure, so he decided to build blocks of bellows of differing sizes connected to the different ranks of pipes, the divided windchest. The higher pressures of the new bellows were felt directly by the organist through the fingers and some organs became physically difficult to play. He therefore included a new British invention, Barker levers, which allowed the pressure on the keys to be offset. A small bellow, called a pneumatic, is inflated by the organ’s wind supply and placed under each pipe to overcome the resistance of the valves. Thus louder and more powerful organs can be played by the human hand.

Most importantly, he turned his practical mind to the issue of registration—the combination of stops that are used at any one time and which give the special tonal quality to the sound produced. Until Cavaillé-Coll, organists had to set the registration at the beginning of a piece and continue until the end. Cavaillé-Coll devised a system where the organist could set up alternate registrations that were on-call, “appel”, and switch to the new registration with a simple maneuver. The ability to change the tone and thus the mood and the message of the music during a performance was astounding and liberated organists—and soon composers—to express complex and changing musical ideas.

The radical changes Cavaillé-Coll brought to the mechanics of organs gave the instrument an enormously enlarged scope, which completely changed organ building. It has been compared to the evolution from a harpsichord to a piano; in the organ world there is a pre- and post- Cavaillé-Coll. Although he played no instruments himself, his musical sense and taste were valued by the organists who worked with him. When people speak about his genius, they often are not referencing his mechanical inventions but his sensitivity to the unique sound desired for each space. For all his talent in mechanics, he was truly driven by his desire to create beautiful sounds.

For example, his organ at St. Sulpice, built in 1862 for a large church with a seminary attached, differs greatly from the sound of the rebuilt organ at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, completed six years later. In the former he went for subtlety and flexibility, knowing it would be used for a wide variety of services. Notre Dame was the national cathedral and thus he created a much bigger, more imposing style (the organ has since been rebuilt significantly from his original design). While he often had to work with existing cases and architectural limitations, another facet of his genius, demonstrated in all his organs, was in organizing the different pipes to produce the best sound in the space. He considered the acoustics of the space an additional stop in his organ building.

Thanks to Cavaillé-Coll, organist composers found many wonderful, exciting new organs to play and after some grousing by critics (the organs sounded too secular, they were flashy and lacked depth) young musicians began responding to the new possibilities with a new kind of music. A seminal work is the 6th Symphony, not to mention the most well-known organ piece, the Toccata from the 5th Symphony, by Charles-Marie Widor, who became the organist at St. Sulpice in 1870. He dazzled audiences with the range of sound Cavaillé-Coll’s instrument had to offer. Among other composers who adapted their work to the enormous versatility of sound available in the new organs were Cesar Franck, Camille Saint-Saens and Louis Vierne.

With only a hiatus during the 1870 Prussian war and siege, when Cavaillé-Coll’s workshop on the avenue du Maine shut down, he worked hard at organ-building from 1829 until his death in 1899. He had established himself as France’s pre-eminent organ builder with the Basilica at Saint-Denis (1841), and La Madeleine (1846), but his most prolific period came during the reign of Napoleon III and his prefect Baron Haussmann. He completed organs for Saint Vincent-de-Paul (1852), Sainte-Clotilde (1858), Saint Sulpice (1862), Notre-Dame Cathedral (1867), and Sainte-Trinite (1869) in that period.

Thus in 1886, when Holy Trinity founders went looking for an organ, they turned to Cavaillé-Coll. American interaction with the Paris social elite ensured that the founders would have heard Cavaillé-Coll’s house organs at the homes of their friends and families. For example, Winnaretta Singer, Princess de Polignac, an American-born patron of musicians, had a Cavaillé-Coll organ installed in her home. She and her brother, Mortimer, a Holy Trinity parishioner and acquaintance of Cavaillé-Coll, were among the many children of Isaac Singer of sewing machine fame. In the 1920s, American composers such as Melville Smith, Aaron Copland, Elliot Carter, Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson listened to composer Nadia Boulanger’s 1905 Cavaillé-Coll-Mutin organ while studying at her Paris home.

The vestry contracted in June 1886 with Cavaillé-Coll for a 36-stop three-manual organ, but when installed in September 1887 it had grown to 45 stops. In 1922 10 new stops were added, bringing more depth and color to the pedal division in particular, as changing repertoire demanded. This work was undertaken by the firm Cavaillé-Coll-Mutin (Charles Mutin entered the firm as a 14-year-old apprentice and went on to become Cavaillé-Coll’s successor). In 1930 the firm Cavaillé-Coll-Mutin-Convers rebuilt the wind bellows, the windchests and incorporated new technology which allowed the addition of five orchestral stops. Interestingly, this firm had sent two technicians to study organ building with the American Ernest Skinner upon the strong recommendation of the Cathedral’s own organist, Lawrence K. Whipp, and they applied their new know-how on our organ.

The final iteration of Cavaillé-Coll’s company, including Pleyel, still a major piano building company, closed its organ division at the time of the Second World War. But the reputation of Cavaillé-Coll lives on, as do many of his instruments, including our very own which is considered one of his masterpieces, the only one built for an Episcopalian church. If the funding is forthcoming, it will be completely renovated and restored in the coming years (see Feasibility Study). According to Dr. Carolyn Shuster Fournier, a Cavaille-Coll scholar, “The new organ at the American Cathedral will maintain all of this organ’s historic pipework. This will not only be one of the finest organs in Paris but throughout the entire world. This magnificent organ will not only ensure beautiful liturgical services, but will open doors to sharing beauty with musicians throughout the world.” Our “historic Cavaillé-Coll” is indeed a precious legacy which we are proud to pass on to the next generations.

Sources: “The Genius of Cavaille-Coll”, five DVD set, winner of 2014 BBC Music Magazine DVD documentary of the year; Dr. Carolyn Shuster Fournier, former American Cathedral organist (1988-1989), honorary titular of the 1867 Aristide Cavaillé-Coll choir organ at Ste. Trinité Church, Paris, PhD dissertation on Cavaillé-Coll secular organs; Andrew Dewar, Cathedral Organist; Zachary Ullery, Cathedral Music Director; and many on-line sources including most importantly Vox Humana Journal.

[1] Charles-Marie Widor, “Avant-propos to the organ symphonies,” from John R. Near, Widor: A Life Beyond the Toccata (University of Rochester Press, 2011).