LDV113-4

26 FRANCK What’s more, Franck himself played his works on many different organs, adapting the registrations for each instrument, each acoustic and so on. He even wrote his Trois Pièces of 1878 especially for the inauguration of the Cavaillé-Coll organ in the Trocadéro concert hall. 1 The manuscript includes his registrations inspired by this gigantic instrument, which had four manuals and sixty-six stops, in a concert hall with 4,600 seats! These indications written in by the composer himself are obviously invaluable. He would certainly have done the same if he had played at Saint-Sernin, whose organ was inaugurated in 1889 (Franck died the following year). It’s probable that the Six Pièces pour le Grand Orgue (1856-64), which mark a key renewal of the repertory in France, were inspired by the sound palette of the organ of Sainte-Clotilde. But thirty years later, when he built the organ of Saint- Sernin, Cavaillé-Coll had developed further, as had Franck with his three great Chorals , and they sound splendid on the Toulouse organ! In any case, I decided not to restrict the intensity of my instrument, nor to damage its coherence, so as to attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of the palette of the Sainte-Clotilde organ in Franck’s time: you don’t rein in a racehorse! 1 Cavaillé-Coll built the organ of the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris in 1878, on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle..