When the Roger Dubuis Excalibur Grande Complication arrived on April 1st last year, it was anything but a joke. Created for the 30th anniversary of the eponymous brand, it was a ticking testament of everything that Roger Dubuis (1938-2017) stood for: expressive, groundbreaking watchmaking. A Grand Complication in watchmaking is a sometimes-misused term in watchmaking, as there is no clear classification of what a watch should offer to bear this finest label. In this case hower, the name is however beyond doubt justified: perpetual calendar, minute repeater, flying tourbillon, and a double micro rotor – all expressed with a design that is unique for the brand based in Meyrin.
And what do we have in front of us?
Let’s start with the bi-retrograde display of the day of the week and the day of the month. The double retrograde is a co-patented solution first made by Roger Dubuis together and Jean-Marc Wiederrecht. The two friends developed this system for Harry Winston in the late 1980s, and just as it would become a signature used on the first RD watch released in 1995, the bi-retrograde is to this day an important complication for Agenhor, the company founded by Mr. Wiederrecht and his wife, Catherine, the year after, in 1996. The friends would go on to show that bi-retrogrades can be miles apart from each other when it comes to the final design. Just compare the romantic, soft, storytelling bows on Pont des Amoreux made for Van Cleef & Arpels by Agenhor, with Roger Dubuis’ industrial, edgy, open-worked and wildly swooping arches.
The perpetual calendar was another favorite of Roger Dubuis. Here we have the months and the leap year on two open discs at 12 o’clock. Both have a circular grain, just one of hundreds of tiny details that can let any watch geek visually wonder through this watch for hours. Yes, there are more precise QPs on the market. But I do believe that you can live with having to make one correction per century.
The Poinçon de Genève-labeled in-house caliber has a 60-hour power reserve, and one of the reasons for its extreme precision is of course the flying tourbillon escapement placed between 5 and 6 o’clock. The tourbillon cage is mirror polished, and to further comply with today’s standards of lightweight and non-magnetic criteria, it is crafted entirely in titanium.
I did not measure the volume of the sound, but my impression is that the 45-millimeter pink gold case works extremely well as an acoustic resonator for the minute repeater, which is operated by a slider on the left caseband. The notes of the minute repeater is also something special, especially if you are into musical history. The three tones – a low pitch for the hours, a high pitch for the minutes and two tones for the quarters actually form what was known as “the devil’s chord,” or the “diabolus in musica”. During medieval times this dissonant interval was strictly prohibited in religious compositions – but a few hundred years later it became one of the foundations of blues music.
So, the Roger Dubuis Excalibur Grande Complication is anything but a joke – it is a tribute to the highest standards of watchmaking, to musical history, and of course to a man who changed the course of Geneva watchmaking 31 years ago.
