The reopening this weekend of Notre Dame is a succession of ceremonies to breathe life back into the long-lasting cathedral and have a good time the recovery from its devastating fire in 2019.
High points can be the ritualized reopening of the cathedral’s massive doors, the reawakening of its thunderous organ and the celebration of the primary Mass. For each France and the Catholic Church, the televised and tightly scripted ceremonies can be a chance to display can-do resilience and global influence.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and dozens of heads of state and government accepted invites from French President Emmanuel Macron. The Catholic faithful are so desirous to worship again inside Notre Dame that tickets for the primary week of Masses were snapped up in 25 minutes, the cathedral’s rector says.
During part one in all Notre Dame’s rebirth on Saturday evening, Archbishop Laurent Ulrich will lead greater than 1,500 guests through a reopening service. Part two, on Sunday, is an inaugural Mass, with special rites to consecrate the primary altar.
Open, great doors
On Saturday, Ulrich will first reopen Notre Dame’s great doors — by tapping them along with his crosier, or bishop’s staff.
The staff was created for the occasion by designer Sylvain Dubuisson. The wood — bearing visible black traces from the blaze — was made with pieces of the cathedral roof that collapsed within the inferno, Dubuisson told The Associated Press.
In response to the archbishop’s door-knocks, the cathedral will erupt into song, its choirs once more filling the cavernous spaces.
That back-and-forth will occur thrice. The doors will then open so guests can stream inside past their sculptures of biblical figures.
Reawakening the nice organ
The voice of Notre Dame’s great organ hasn’t been heard in public for the reason that blaze coated the nearly 8,000 pipes with toxic dust released when the lead roofing burned.
After the door-opening rites, Ulrich will reawaken the enormous instrument. He’ll address it directly with a series of eight incantations, starting with “Awaken, organ, sacred instrument: Sing the praise of God.”
That prompt will launch a conversation with the organ, with 4 organists (Olivier Latry, Vincent Dubois, Thibault Fajoles and Thierry Escaich) taking turns to play its responses.
They’ll be perched high above the congregation, seated on the newly renovated giant console that controls the instrument — through five keyboards of 56 notes each, foot pedals for 30 notes, and 115 stops.
Off-the-cuff responses
Latry says he and the opposite organists will improvise their responses to the archbishop’s prompts — depending on their very own and the congregation’s mood.
“Since it’s improvisation, you actually need to feel the moment,” Latry told AP.
“When I’m there, I’ll know what I’m going to do. Before that, I simply have a couple of ideas however the ideas will not be fully formed — because they’ll change depending on the atmosphere, the lighting, the individuals who’ll be down below, their response.”
The organ has an unlimited palette of sounds to play with. The deepest of its 7,952 pipes are as large as a human torso, producing a low rumbling sound. The smallest are not any larger than a pen.
The painstaking re-tuning of the organ — after it was dismantled, cleaned and put back together — took around six months, with tuners working at night so that they could tweak the notes in silence.
Billionaires and poor Parisians among the many guests
Before the hearth, efforts to fund renovations of the nearly 900-year-old cathedral had been struggling. But that modified with the blaze.
“We had an outpouring of support,” says fund-raising committee member Michel Picaud. “I received 400 donations an hour, so my smartphone completely crashed.”
In all, 340,000 people from greater than 150 countries donated 846 million euros (US$364 million), the general public body accountable for Notre Dame’s restauration says. The support testifies to global affection for the monument that transcends frontiers and faiths.
“It’s something which belongs to everybody,” Picaud told AP. The nonprofit he leads, Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris, has raised $57 million from 50,000 international donors, most of them Americans.
“It’s not only a Parisian cathedral or monument,” he said. “All over the world, I believe, people have the sensation that this is an element of their — I might say — heritage.”
At the reopening, billionaire donors from France and beyond will rub shoulders with other guests far less fortunate.
They’ll include “the poorest amongst Parisians, all those that are helped by charitable associations and who can be several hundred contained in the cathedral,” Rev. Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, Notre Dame’s rector, told AP.
Primped for the occasion
Although construction work continues outside, the restored interiors look more magnificent than they’ve for generations.
The limestone partitions are creamy and luminous, cleaned of years of amassed grime. Vaulted ceilings that collapsed have been repaired. The archbishop and other members have latest garments, from a designer who has also dressed Beyoncé, Rihanna and others. The cathedral also has latest furniture, including a latest altar to exchange one crushed when the flaming spire collapsed.
The rector says “nobody alive has seen the cathedral” because it looks now.
“The blondness of the stone, the brilliance of the paintings, the sunshine through the stained glass windows, all of the artworks, all of the paintings, that were cleaned, the statues that were restored,” he said.
“All of that didn’t exist before the hearth.”
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AP journalists Thomas Adamson and Alex Turnbull contributed to this report.
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For more of AP’s coverage on Notre Dame, visit https://apnews.com/hub/notre-dame-cathedral
