A Sound Mirror: Notre Dame Cathedral's Restoration Can Be Heard in Its Resonance
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You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Christine Arismath. When Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral reopened in early December, it seemed a miracle. A horrific fire in April of 2019 left the cathedral smoldering. Covered in toxic lead dust, its iconic spire toppled.

But thousands of artisans, builders, and craftspeople resurrected the cathedral in a mere five years. With some 50 world leaders in attendance, the reopening ceremony showcased the cathedral's art, history, and religious rituals. And the cathedral's 8,000-pipe organ played a leading role.

NPR's Eleanor Beardsley met Notre Dame's longest-serving organist just days before the cathedral reopened. Olivier Latry says he was the last to play Notre Dame's organ on Palm Sunday, 2019, the day before the fire. He is one of four official Notre Dame organists. I meet him in a Paris café a couple days before the cathedral reopens. Latry says he entered a competition and applied for the job on a lark.

I was young and totally inconscient. I was absolutely not nervous to go there because I thought, it's not for me, so it should be just a nice experience. And that's it. But he got the job. It's now been 40 years.

Of course, I thought it was going to collapse.

and the organ and everything. Latry and his wife flew back to Paris the next day. Emerging from the metro in front of the church, he was afraid to look up. But it was a beautiful spring day, and a tree in full bloom hid most of the damage. The only thing that we could see was just the two towers illuminated by the sun. And they were so white because they received so much water from the firemen. You know, we couldn't imagine that something happened to Notre-Dame.

It was a little bit like Notre Dame was saying to us, you know, I was there 850 years ago. Don't worry, I will still be there in 1000 years. And that was so incredible.

Thank you. It's superb. President Macron recently toured the restored cathedral. His visit was broadcast live on French TV. Macron talked with master organ builder Christian Lutz, who told him some of the pipes from Notre-Dame's Grande Orgue date to the 1400s. The instrument is three stories tall, and it sits right near the hole left in the roof when the spire collapsed. We were so happy to see that the Grande Orgue was intact.

So I'll never forget the joy we felt when we discovered that the Grand Organ was intact. Yes, it was filled with lead dust, but it had not burned. It didn't melt in the heat, and the firemen had not inundated it with water. They knew what they were doing.

The organ was dismounted piece by piece, removed from the cathedral, cleaned and refurbished. Lutz said the most complex phase came when they reinstalled the organ and had to harmonize it in a noisy work site. For the harmonization, each pipe is tuned in intensity and timber in relation to the others, he explained to Macron. You need absolute silence.

So for six months, they worked in the cathedral at night. La Trie was part of those overnight sessions. An organ, especially an organ like Notre-Dame, has the soul of all the organ builders who worked in it. And I think it's very important really to try to collaborate because the organ builders are already part of the interpretation of the pieces that we will play afterwards.

Latry was able to play the organ last month after the scaffolding inside the cathedral was taken down. He says it is just as it was before, but the acoustics are transformed. The sound lasts a full eight seconds. Because the stone is just...

clean. There is no dust and we can hear that kind of big waves going until the end of the church. He says the organ is a sound mirror of the cathedral's architecture and a key part of its liturgy. There will be a special organ blessing and wake-up ritual for the organ Saturday evening. This wake-up of the organ is something really incredible because eight times the archbishop will say a small sentence

The first one, for example, will be "Org", how the instrument gets up, gets awake. Eight times a different command, for example: "Holy organs celebrate the suffering and resurrection of Christ." Latry says the organist must answer, always improvising to be in the emotion of the moment. And each time we have to comment to find the right music to comment the words.

It lasts 10 minutes or something like this, but it's an incredible moment. This is the true mission of an organist, he says, to be the voice and soul of the cathedral. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris. That's the state of the world from NPR.

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