(Paris) Pipe by pipe, the great organ of Notre-Dame de Paris, which once made the stones of the Gothic cathedral tremble, are being painstakingly dismantled after the devastating fire of last year.
Posted on August 3 2020 at 11 h 46
Associated Press
The titanic task of disassembling, cleaning and reassembling France's largest musical instrument began on Monday and is expected to last nearly four years. It will take six months just to tune the organ, and its music should not resound in the medieval monument in Paris before 2024, according to the state agency responsible for the restoration of Notre-Dame.
Surprisingly, the organ and its 8000 pipes survived the April fire 2019 which consumed the roof of the cathedral and overturned the spire of Viollet-le-Duc. But the fire blanketed the instrument with toxic lead dust which must now be carefully disposed of.
And although the organ did not burn, it was damaged by record heat waves last summer and other temperature variations to which it has been exposed since the 12th cathedral th century has lost its roof, said the public establishment responsible for the conservation and restoration of Notre-Dame.
Experts attended the patient removal of the keyboards from the organ on Monday; its pipes will then be released in a teardown process that will last until the end of this year, according to the restoration agency. The pieces will be placed in special containers inside the huge cathedral; cleaning and catering will take place on site.
General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who heads the restoration agency of the cathedral, declared that the organ, which dates from 1733 , will play again on 11 April 2024, five years after the fire.
President Emmanuel Macron hopes that the cathedral will be able to reopen in time for the Olympic Games of 2024 in Paris. But it took more than a year to remove toxic lead residue and scaffolding that had been erected before the fire, for an earlier renovation effort; the actual reconstruction has not yet started.
