Very last Cavaillé-Coll:

for a revival...

At the end of the 19th century, Guy Ropartz, composer and head of Nancy Conservatory, places an order to the famous organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll for a 15-stop organ, with 2 manuals and a pedalboard of 32 keys, to be installed as a brand new instrument for the organ studio.

​

The instrument was installed in a box of the Salle Poirel concert hall, located next to the Conservatory, and dedicated on March 12, 1898 by Eugène Gigout, organist native from Nancy. This organ stands in Cavaillé-Coll’s order book as its last authentic instrument built in the famous organ manufacture Avenue du Maine, in Paris.

​

In 1919, the City of Nancy orders Charles Mutin, successor of Cavaillé-Coll, a bigger organ to be installed at the back of the scene of the same concert hall, to the condition that Mutin removes the original organ still in place and re-installs it in the backstage of the Théâtre Municipal (city theatre), now known as the Opera house, on the place Stanislas of Nancy.

​

For lack of available space in the Opera house, Mutin transformed the instrument by removing the case and the pedal stops, re-arranged the windchests of both divisions to be superposed and put in a mutual expressive box, and also modified the action and the console’s position.

 

At the beginning of the 1970s, the City of Nancy decided to get rid of the instrument, deemed cumbersome and not played anymore, at a time of questionable choices… The organ was set to disappear forever, when a local organ enthusiast offered to decommission the organ for free, which was granted to the condition that he disassembled the organ by his own means, and quickly, to make room. The organ, decommissioned, became de facto owned by his savior, but has never been rebuilt and heard since. It lays in pieces for several decades, relentlessly deteriorating.

 

Re-discovered by chance and acquired by the Association pour le Renouveau des Orgues de la Cathédrale de Nancy, its new owners started to make case to rebuild the instrument in place of the current choir organ of the Nancy cathedral, in the case dated 1844.