The Opera Musical Watch by Jacob & Co. combines traditional Swiss crafts in an astounding timepiece. It’s where grand complications dance to the watchmaker’s tune.
The Opera Musical Watch is a marvel that expresses the best traditional crafts of Switzerland. One of them is the making of mechanical music boxes, with their cylinders and combs. And then, there is fine watchmaking, a world in itself.
What the watch does…
A visual marvel is what’s on offer. The watch has two cylinders mounted on two of the four axes emanating from the centre of the movement. These are driven by a central flywheel and play a 30-second melody consisting of 120 notes, each of which is played as the tiny studs on the cylinder make contact with the individual blades of the comb, whose different lengths create the different notes. But the magic lies in the fact that as these cylinders make their melody, so does the entire ‘assemblage’ on the dial, including the tourbillon and the hour and minute dial, which rotates 120 degrees around the dial.
A pusher located on the case middle activates the melody (Memory by Andrew-Lloyd Webber from the musical Cats) and thus the rotation of the movement. The watch features the Jacob & Co. triple axis tourbillon, which rotates around its inner cage once in 40 seconds, its intermediate cage in three minutes and its outer cage in eight minutes.
The new movement
Jacob & Co. especially developed an entirely new mechanical movement specifically for this model: the manually wound calibre JCFM02. It makes use of titanium components for excellent sound propagation and also for its properties of lightness. The 43 mm case fits all the 646 components.
Expressions
There are two different versions of the watch. One has a large transparent sapphire dome and the wearer can view the mechanics beneath. The other has music-themed adornments: sheet music decorating one of the combs, a piano decorating the other, the tips of the comb emerging to look like the keys on the piano, which are struck by the pins on the cylinder as it turns. An off-centre dial in rose gold evokes a structure of a stringed instrument.
The Opera Musical Watch clearly provides much more than musical enchantment.