For ten years, the most photographed church in Canada has been photographed around the edges. Scaffolding has wrapped the facade of Notre-Dame Basilica in Old Montreal for close to a decade, and visitors who came to see the twin Gothic towers of James O'Donnell's 19th-century masterpiece have had to imagine them through a lattice of steel. On Oct. 25, the lattice comes down. The basilica is holding a grand unveiling of the restored facade, and it has built the day around music rather than speeches.
The centrepiece is a free concert by the New World Philharmonic Society — the Société philharmonique du Nouveau Monde — under its artistic director, Michel Brousseau, joined by organist Jean-Willy Kunz. The basilica's own announcement puts the start at 12:30 p.m. and describes the performance as taking place both outside and inside the church. An open-air performance in front of the basilica is planned before the concert moves indoors, so anyone who simply shows up on the plaza can watch the facade come back into view while the music plays.
Kunz is a fitting choice for the occasion. He is organist-in-residence of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and one of four organists on the basilica's musical team, alongside Mária Budáčová, Jacquelin Rochette and Martin Boucher. The instrument he will play is one of the largest and most storied pipe organs in North America. The contract to build it was signed in 1885 with Casavant Frères, a firm founded only five years earlier; the pastor wanted a four-manual organ that would be the largest on the continent, and Casavant sent one of the brothers to Europe to study with the best builders he could find. In France he met Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who had restored the great organs of Notre-Dame Cathedral and Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and that encounter shaped the Montreal instrument's French symphonic character. Inaugurated in 1891, it now has some 7,000 pipes, the longest stretching more than 32 feet and the smallest a quarter-inch long, across 92 stops.
The New World Philharmonic Society is led by Brousseau, who brings together the New World Philharmonic Orchestra and three choirs based in Montreal, the Lower Laurentians and Ottawa — more than 150 singers, soloists and professional musicians. Brousseau, a conductor, choral director and pianist, also leads the Chœur du Barreau du Grand Montréal.
What the crowd will be looking at is the product of a decade of difficult, expensive and occasionally humbling work. Michel Issa, executive director of the Fabrique de la paroisse Notre-Dame de Montréal, estimates the full restoration — exterior and interior — will cost $100 million, and that only about 20 per cent of the necessary work is done. The exterior alone should take another four years, he says, a figure he concedes may be optimistic; the interior will take five to 10 more years after that.
The problems are structural, not cosmetic. Mathieu Verreault, the basilica's director of tourism and operations, explains that all the masonry needs reinforcing and restoration. Years of freeze-thaw cycles have cracked the stone in numerous places. Some of the original stone came from an old quarry in Mile End, and the blocks used higher up the building were salvaged from the bottom of the quarry — poorer quality material to begin with. Worse, some stones were laid "the wrong way round." The stone is sedimentary, so its layers must sit horizontally; laid vertically, it lets rain through. At some point, mortar was replaced with epoxy, which put additional pressure on the stone. "People were doing the best they could with the knowledge available at the time," Verreault told The Canadian Press, "and, obviously, in the long run, all these choices — which have proved questionable over time — have led to the situation we see today."
The damage outside has reached inside. Water penetration and damp have deteriorated the painted decorations, which the parish is not repainting; instead, conservators are painstakingly reattaching every bit of existing paint — "very labour-intensive, very time-consuming, but it is best practice in heritage conservation," Verreault said. The basilica's celebrated star-studded blue vault is among the areas still awaiting restoration, and when that work begins it will require scaffolding roughly 10 storeys high, likely suspending concerts and guided tours and cutting into the church's income.
That is why the fundraising has become almost as inventive as the restoration. The basilica stages benefit concerts and runs fundraising campaigns, and in July it opened Le Firmament by Café Saint-Henri on its front plaza — a partnership with the Quebec specialty coffee pioneer, whose founding café on Notre-Dame Street West relocated to the basilica's forecourt, a move the two organizations described as going from Notre-Dame to Notre-Dame. A portion of the café's proceeds supports the restoration. The latest campaign lets donors "sponsor a stone" and inscribe a digital message on the facade. Issa said the parish would have liked to engrave the stones themselves, but that it was "a logistical nightmare that's impossible to pull off" and would reduce the stones' durability. Instead, the messages will be visible through augmented reality — Issa compared the technology to the viral app Pokémon Go — by pointing a phone at the church, or by projecting a model of the facade onto a flat surface. Sponsorship is already open, but the messages will not be viewable until early 2027.
The basilica itself is older than the country that surrounds it. Ground was broken in 1823, the church was dedicated in 1829, and the facade was completed in 1865; the interior is the work of Victor Bourgeau. Its stone came from the Tanneries quarry in Griffintown, and the building is a national historic site. It has been a minor basilica, a landmark of Old Montreal and, for the past decade, a construction site with a congregation inside.
Oct. 25 is the day the first phase of that long project becomes visible again. The parish is framing it simply: an invitation to look up, to gather, and to rediscover a Montreal jewel. The music starts at 12:30 p.m., and the plaza is open to anyone.