The Grandest Complication: Patek Philippe’s Minute Repeaters
Making the music of time.
I remember very clearly the very first time I ever heard a minute repeater, mostly because it wasn’t a very clear sounding minute repeater.
To be fair, the deck was stacked against the little watch from the start. First of all, the watch was cased in platinum, which is a fantastic metal for watch cases in a lot of ways but it’s not a great material for repeaters as the density and crystal structure of platinum tend to deaden the sound of the chimes. Second, the owner and I had met for a whisky or three at a cigar lounge, which I guess should tell you how long ago this was; cigars were cool. The amount of ambient noise would have challenged an Audemars Piguet Supersonnerie run through a contact microphone and a six foot high stack of Marshall concert amps; the poor little repeater struggled to make itself heard, and between the roar of the nicotine and ethanol soaked crowd and the piped-in music (of which I remember nothing aside from the volume) the most I could hear with the little watch pressed against my ear, was a faint, percussive ting ting ting that had about as much musicality to it as a six-year-old assaulting their first Suzuki-method violin.
A few years after that, I was in Le Brassus at the old Audemars Piguet museum, before the new one had opened up. I remember listening to several minute repeaters, all of them much older than I am. One of them was a small repeater wristwatch in a rectangular case, and the volume and purity of the sound were enough to make a superstitious person wonder if there were not some djinn or other trapped inside the case, playing the gongs. It sounded fantastically and even supernaturally beautiful and I thought when I heard it of a quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, when Jonathan Harker describes in his diary the laughter of the Count’s undead handmaidens: ” … such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand.”
In 2013, Patek put on an exhibition in New York. The company brought its entire current collection of minute repeaters. HODINKEE was there as well and recorded each and every one of the watches and the video, for all that it is ten years old, remains one of the great video tasting menus of horology of the last couple of decades, at least.
Every other watch complication has for all of its history, been designed to become more and more foolproof and to require less and less in the way of human intervention. For that reason, we’ve become obsessed with movement finishing – when the machines can produce components to such a perfect degree of precision that the only thing left for human hands to do is dress things up that already work just fine, anything that smacks of human skill becomes increasingly valuable. Nowadays, you can industrialize pretty much anything in the world of watch complications, including two out of the three traditional high complications – industrialized perpetual calendars and rattrapante chronographs are not really a substitute for the old-school, hand-assembled Real Deal, but they’re uncomfortably close. The minute repeater, on the other hand, has so far resisted industrialization.
I have been able to say that for many years and it appears to continue to be true. In fact, minute repeaters are hard enough to make and difficult enough to make sound good that in any given year you can count the number of new minute repeaters introduced on the fingers of one hand. Even companies that make repeaters, of which there are few, usually have only a small handful of repeating watches in their catalogues at any given time. All sorts of complications flood the market in their legions with every passing year but the minute repeater and its Mycroft-to-Sherlock elder brother, the grande et petite sonnerie, remain rare, and, in a world where hype, exploding demand, and scarcity can make prices for simple watches burst into exuberant growth like so many fungi after a hot summer thunderstorm, repeaters are still expensive for a reason.
Patek Philippe has been making repeaters for about as long as the company has existed at all. Patek sold its first repeater five months after the company opened its first shop on the Quai des Bergues in Geneva. On exactly September the 4th, 1839, Patek sold its first repeater – a quarter repeater, sold to a resident of Bern and therefore presumably about as solid a member of the grande bourgeoisie as could be.
The company sold its first grande et petite sonnerie to a cardinal Pallavicini in Italy, in 1846, and it has been making repeaters ever since. The survival of the minute repeater was by no means guaranteed, however. Patek stopped making them and so did everyone else, during the 1960s and 1970s, but then Patek gradually began to produce repeaters again in the 1980s. The reference 3615 was a unique piece, with minute repeater, perpetual calendar, and chronograph, and it was followed by the 3621, a minute repeater with perpetual calendar and moonphase. In 1985, a unique piece, ref. 3652, was made and unlike the 3615 and 3621, this was a simple time only watch with minute repeater. In 2019, it showed up for auction at Phillips, and sold for CHF 572,000.
Starting in 1989, Patek Philippe began to produce minute repeaters using its own in-house movements, rather than movements supplied by complications specialists like Victorin Piguet. Most of its repeating watches have also included other complications, although there have been simpler watches as well, including my personal favorite, the ref. 3939 from 1982, which is a 33mm minute repeater with tourbillon. The most extreme example of a watch with chiming complications was launched by Patek in 2014: the Grandmaster Chime, which has a total of 20 complications, five of which are striking complications: minute repeater, grande et petite sonnerie, date repeater, and alarm.
A version of the Grandmaster Chime in steel, sold at Only Watch in 2019 for $31 million, making it the most expensive wristwatch ever sold. Patek is participating at Only Watch again this year, but so far has not said what its entrant is going to be – only that it will be a complicated watch, with a movement Patek has never used before and will never use again, and that it will be the first in a limited series of 30 pieces. The movement was, says Patek, created to pay tribute to Philippe Stern and will feature his “favorite grand complication.” I think it’s very likely that the complication in question will be a repeater.
n 2012, Patek published a book detailing its entire history of repeater production, in which Philippe Stern says, ” … Today, everyone is building tourbillons. For me, that doesn’t make sense any longer. Producing them has become routine. Conversely, it is extremely difficult to achieve exceptionally high rate accuracies with tourbillons, which after all is the key issue. Many brands offer tourbillons without mentioning precision because the rate of such watches is often poorer than of those with a normal escapement. In minute repeaters, however, which becoming more and more popular, even laypeople can instantly hear whether their sound is clear, reverberant, and harmonious.”
The repeater, at Patek, today represents a process of evolution which has been going on since the company sold its first repeater in its first year in business, and which has been progressing in its own in-house production of repeaters since 1989, when the R 27 PS and R 27 Q (the latter, a repeater with perpetual calendar) went into production. The repeater is a technically very complex mechanism, but it’s also a musical instrument, and since what constitutes a pleasant tone is subjective, repeaters still need to be tuned by hand and by ear. Repeaters offer a unique horological experience, but they also offer a connection to a suite of skills unlike any other in the watch industry. In a world where watchmaking has increasingly become a business where machines produce high-fidelity simulations of what human hands used to produce, the repeater is one of the last holdouts for old-school watchmaking skills.
Find out more about the art and science of minute repeaters at Patek Philippe.