The Cathedral’s Organ—and Organ Donor
by Craig R. Whitney
Published in Trinité Magazine, Fall 2010
The organ of the American Cathedral in Paris is a superb instrument with a rich musical history, eminently deserving of a major project of restoration and renovation to make it fit to complete a second century of service.
But the organ, which grew to its present size of 5,206 pipes and 80 stops over nearly 125 years, is now showing signs of its age. The leather pouches the flex in the electropneumatic valves that are beneath every one of those pipes, letting pressurized air into them when a note is played to make them “speak,” don’t work well because they are dried out and cracked. The leather bellows in the reservoirs that keep the “wind” in the chests beneath the pipes are failing (the organ sighs about those failings with a loud hissing that can be heard at the communion rail). An entire section of pipes added in 1930 is now not playable because of these problems. Electrical contacts between the “flight deck,” the console with its stopknobs, keyboards, and pedalboard, and the pipes are becoming undependable—making the instrument hard for the organist to “fly.” The console itself is word out and outdated. The microprocessing system that the player uses to prepare in advance the right combination of sounds for the musical has a faulty memory. Pipes squawk when they should be quiet, or remain silent when they should speak.
In short, the organ needs a complete overhaul.
“It’s absolutely essential,” says Edward J. (Ned) Tipton, who ended more than 20 years of service to the Cathedral last summer as Canon Musician—as essential as the organ itself is for services. As the instrument’s steward, Ned had been working with Dean Fleetwood and Cathedral lay leaders for a couple of years in anticipation of the work that would need to be done. “The organ has the first word and the last word,” he said. “It assists the clergy in the direction of the service as it flows along, and accompanies the choir. Without it, a service of the kind and complexity of the Cathedral’s would be impossible.”
Those who attend services at the Cathedral (as my wife, Heidi, and I did from 1995 to 2000) have been truly blessed by Ned, his assistants, and the excellent musicians of the choir over the years. Musicians can be their own worst enemies in trying to convince parishioners the organ needs work because they can make it sound as if it’s in better shape than it actually is. But the Cathedral organ is really crying out for attention now.
And our organ deserves all the care it should be given. Even in a city of great pipe organs and renowned organists, it stands out. It was originally built in 1887 by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the French builder whose masterpiece is the 1862 instrument in the gallery of Saint-Sulpice. As he did at Saint-Sulpice, Cavaillé-Coll made the Cathedral organ an orchestra in itself, with a division of pipes enclosed in a chamber with shutters that open and close. Coupled with the rest of the organ or not, this “Récit expressif” section can make music swell from a subdued pianissimo to a fortissimo roar, with a power that used to thrill me when I played it in the later ‘90s and, I know, thrills listeners as well.
French organists and composers like Alexandre Guilmant, Maurice Duruflé and Marcel Dupré were inspired by this 19th-century innovation of Cavaillé-Coll’s to create thrilling organ music that has a symphonic dimension. And all of these musical giants helped make the Cathedral organ what it is today, an instrument capable of sounding as good paying Bach or a processional hymn as it does playing Franck or Widor or Saint-Saëns.
Guilmant played the opening recital in 1887 on the original organ, half its present size. Pipes and keyboards were all up above the right side of the chancel, above where the organist plays at the console today. Acousitcal challenges created by the church’s architectural design (not to mention the difficulty for the organist, stuck up there among the pipes, of accompanying the service while unable to se eor hear much of what was going on) led to changes and an enlargement in 1922 by a successor company, Cavaillé-Coll-Mutin, with Dupré as musical consultant.
Dupré had been much impressed during a 94-concert tour of the United States that year with the results that American organ builders like Ernest M. Skinner had achieved with electricity, expanding the orchestral potential of their pipe organs and making them easier to play by using electric wires instead of balky mechanical connections between the keyboards and the valves that let air into the pipes to make them speak. So the organ was electrified and a new console, the “flight deck” with its pedals and keyboards, was put on the floor.
Problems with the Cathedral’s less than reverberant acoustics brought Dupré back as consultant with another successor firm, Convers/Cavaillé-Coll, in 1930, when the Solo division, and a fourth keyboard, were added, with a French horn, tuba, shimmering strings and a solid, rumbling bass produced by pipes 16 and 32 feet long added to the organ’s orchestral palette.
A small antiphonal organ was installed in the gallery in 1970 and, in 1993, as part of a general tonal revision under Ned’s oversight, the Paris builder Bernard Dargassies replaced it with a new “Grand Chœur” division whose broad range of sound was designed to focus the full resources of the organ, front and back, into the nave. The organists Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, widow of the composer, and Marilyn Keiser played the re-inaugural recitals on the organ.
An instrument of the size and musical quality of the Cathedral’s would take at least several million euros to replace. But scrapping it would almost be sacrilege. As the Cathedral looks for a new canon musician to build on the work of Ned, Assistant Musician Zachary Ullery and the current Artist-in-Residence Andrew Dewar, it is soliciting ideas and proposals from qualified organ builders for restoration and renewal of the organ to bring the organ to full glory.
There are many things that can be done—revoicing pipes that have been damaged over the years, adding stops to the gallery organ, replacing electropneumatic chests, with their pesky leather valves, with longer-lasting ones like those the Cavaillé-Coll organ was originally built with. This could allow the real strengths of the organ, its full bodied foundation stops (the Diapason and Montre, which produce the sounds most people thing of first when the remember hearing an organ) and most of its powerful “brass” section (the Trompette, Bombarde, Clarion and Chamade stops) to sound the way they were designed to sound. That Solo division installed in 1930, on higher wind pressure than the others, might benefit from some voicing adjustments if the Cathedral musicians decide they would make it blend better with the rest of the ensemble. The various sections of the organ need humidifiers, to keep the wooden chests from drying out and leaking air in the winter. Ned used to go up there with pails of water sometimes, not a good idea if they spill.
The bids for work on the organ itself that have been solicited so far have ranged from a few hundred thousand euros to over a million, and the Cathedral is continuing to ask for proposals. These are not extravagant sums for work that is crying out to be done on an organ as big and as important as the Cathedral’s, but a final visionary master plan must be completed, and after that, the money has to be raised. As Dean Fleetwood put it, “We don’t want just a patch job. What we do should last at least 100 years.”
A glorious musical monument awaits an endowment to save it for generations to come.