On Halloween night, beneath the gleaming folds of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, a cathedral rose—not of stone, but of sound and shadow. As the 1923 silent film The Hunchback of Notre Dame flickered across the screen, master organist Clark Wilson conjured medieval Paris through the hall’s monumental pipe organ. This was no mere screening—it was a resurrection, a haunting tribute to cinema’s silent majesty.

From the first reverberating chord, Wilson plunged the audience into Universal Pictures’ audacious dream: a 15th-century Paris rebuilt in 1920s Los Angeles. That elaborate replica of Notre-Dame, constructed by hundreds and later lost to fire, lived again in Wilson’s score, each note a requiem for vanished grandeur.

And then came Lon Chaney. As Quasimodo, Chaney’s performance remains one of cinema’s most astonishing physical and emotional metamorphoses. Beneath layers of prosthetics, he radiated heartbreak. Wilson’s accompaniment seemed to breathe for him, voicing what the silent grotesque could not.

“It was not just a screening — it was a summoning.”

The organ became the cathedral itself. Its thunder marked the tolling of the bells; its chimes shimmered through Esmeralda’s grace. Drawing from the French Romantic tradition—Mulet, Franck, Vierne, Guilmant—and weaving in hints of Grieg and Boccherini, Wilson’s score honored the lost 1923 orchestration by Hugo Riesenfeld with elegance and restraint.

Riesenfeld once said music should “accentuate the action and bring out subtleties elusive to the average person.” On this night, Wilson did just that. Quasimodo’s longing, Esmeralda’s innocence, the mob’s savagery—all flickered with renewed urgency. The organ didn’t just accompany; it testified.

The audience leaned forward, breath held. Time blurred. Los Angeles became Paris; 2025 became 1923. After Quasimodo’s final, tragic gesture, the screen faded to black. A hush lingered—then, as if breaking a spell, thunderous applause. In a city built on illusion, The Hunchback of Notre Dame remains both mirror and memory. And in Clark Wilson’s hands, Hollywood’s lost cathedrals sang once more.

— Rosane Grimberg.

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