From Padua to New Orleans: 1,970 pipes find a home

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

There are 1,970 pipes, 50 “speaking” stops, 34 pipe “ranks” and even 12 tiny bells, but the 3D musical jigsaw puzzle being pieced together by a team of Italian craftsmen inside Notre Dame Seminary Chapel will coalesce in a pipe organ that both honors the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ French heritage and produces a resonant sound matched to the chapel’s size and acoustics.

The new Fratelli Ruffatti pipe organ – designed and built from scratch in Padua, Italy, and then disassembled and shipped, slowly, by boat to New Orleans – will replace a century-old organ that dates to the seminary’s establishment in 1923.

Organ funded by legacy gift
An unexpected legacy gift to the seminary six years ago – long before the pandemic – allowed then-seminary rector Father James Wehner to consider replacing the chapel’s original organ, built by the Baltimore-based M.P. Moller Co., whose maintenance over the years had become challenging based on the need to restore 100-year-old parts.

Fittingly, in the same way the seminary community is awaiting the first notes produced by the organ – scheduled for next month after the organ is carefully “voiced” – patience was the key in the organ’s journey across the Atlantic Ocean to New Orleans.

The new instrument took the milk route, leaving Italy in a meticulously packed container in November 2021 and did not arrive at the Port of New Orleans until July 2.

The organ container made stops in Spain, Canada, the Bahamas, Mexico and Houston, Texas. Seminary officials tracked the organ’s progress with a satellite app that could pinpoint the ship’s location.

But, the delay was worth it, said Max Tenney, associate professor, organist and director of sacred music at Notre Dame Seminary, who worked during the last four years with Fratelli Ruffatti architect Michela Ruffatti, a granddaughter of the company’s founders, to design the organ.

Huge grins all around
“I’m ecstatic,” Tenney said.

Since the organ was designed specifically for the chapel, the design work included visits by the Ruffatti team to take careful measurements and test the chapel’s acoustics.

“And then we began to talk about what the organ needed to do,” Tenney said. “A seminary organ is particular in that it has to serve the needs of the seminary community, which are a little bit different than the needs of a parish or a cathedral in that we celebrate the Divine Office every day. Michela is an architect by training, and she designed all the physical parts. She was the one who had to say, ‘How can we fit this into this?’ And the artistic part came when she designed the case, which is very beautiful. Ideally, it will look like something that’s always been there, and it’s going to be there for the next 100 years.”

After getting three proposals, the seminary chose Fratelli Ruffatti based on its history and workmanship, Tenney said.

“There’s was by far the best and most comprehensive,” Tenney said. “For lack of a better term, we got the best organ for the dollar. It’s just the finest quality instrument that you ever could conceive of. They’ve been building organs there for 200 years. It’s an amazing family operation.”

The French-style organ has a rank of trumpet pipes that creates “a very powerful, incisive tone.”

“We actually named it the ‘Cor de Wehner’ (the Horn of Wehner), in tribute to Father Wehner,” Tenney said, laughing. “It’s the loudest, most commanding stop on the organ.”

Archbishop gets a notch
The principal pipe – a 16-foot alloy of tin and lead – has an etching on its mouth in honor of Archbishop Gregory Aymond, the 14th metropolitan archbishop of New Orleans.

Ruffatti said the pipe-making is a delicate process that goes back centuries and involves a team of artisans to create a work of musical art.

“The pipes are made of an alloy of lead and tin – in different percentages – according to the type of sound they have to produce,” Ruffatti said. “The higher the lead content, the softer the sound. The flute, for example, has a higher lead content, while the principals (pipes) will have a high tin content. They need a more brilliant sound.

“Even the very large pipes, they are rolled by hand,” she added. “They are placed on a mold and seven people at the same time along the length of the pipe will turn it around.”

The pipes range in size from 16 feet to the size of a lead pencil, Ruffatti said.

The nomenclature of many of the organ’s 50 stops will be in French. Even though the Fratelli Ruffatti company is based in Italy, its team has spent decades studying pipe scales – the dimensions of organ pipes from historic instruments – “in an attempt to recreate those sounds that are very famous from the French organ-building school,” Tenney said.

Additional good news is that the original Moller organ will find a new home in the Diocese of Lake Charles, Tenney said.

The Oratory of St. Francis de Sales in Sulphur, Louisiana, is being erected in a previously closed church and has agreed to refurbish the organ for its new space.

Tenney said Lake Charles Bishop Glen John Provost was a former student organist at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

Current Notre Dame Seminary rector-president Father Joshua Rodrigue also is an organist.

Father Rodrigue said his third-floor bedroom is located adjacent to the chapel’s choir loft. He is curious about what the sound will be like at such close quarters.

“Michela said we’re going to have to put some time restraints on the guys – that they can’t play the bombard pipes after a certain time,” Father Rodrigue said. “It will be interesting to hear what happens when it is all full out. If the guys accidentally sleep in for Mass, they’ll know they’ve missed Mass if they hear the organ rattling their room.”

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