58 It was in 1402 that Federicus Schambantz installed an organ in Notre-Dame, on a stone platform built for the purpose under the western rose window. The instrument remained unchanged for more than two centuries, until Valéran de Héman added a second and then a third department between 1608 and 1610. It remained in this state until the alterations carried out by François Thierry in 1733, which brought the instrument to forty-seven stops on five manuals. It was then considered the finest in the kingdom. The second intervention in the eighteenth century was that of François-Henri Clicquot in 1788. The Revolution had little impact on the instrument; it suffered only a few axe-blows that destroyed the fleurs-de-lis on the case. But it escaped the demolition order that consigned many masterpieces to the stove . . . In the nineteenth century, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll created a sound palette that no one had ever attempted before, and made the Notre-Dame organ a unique model of organ design, featuring mixture stops, mutation stops, and complete families of reed stops such as Bassoons and Clarinets. The builder was well aware that he had created his masterpiece here. The inauguration took place in 1868. With the passage of time, a number of renovations proved indispensable. Then, from 1963, at the instigation of Pierre Cochereau, Cavaillé-Coll’s Barker levers were replaced by electric action, and a new console was fitted by Jean Hermann. The pipework then shifted towards a more neoclassical aesthetic, with the builders Robert and Jean-Loup Boisseau, through the addition of plein-jeux in the classical style and chamades (horizontal pipes) that adorned Thierry’s case.
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