A grande sonnerie is the most demanding thing a watchmaker can build, and there are only a handful of manufacturers who make one at all. Unlike a minute repeater, which chimes on demand when the owner activates it, a grande sonnerie strikes the hours and the quarters automatically as they pass, which means the striking mechanism has to run continuously alongside the timekeeping without robbing it, and the watch has to carry enough stored energy to do that all day. This reference carries a grande sonnerie, a petite sonnerie and a minute repeater in one movement, on a carillon of multiple gongs, with the Supersonnerie acoustic work behind it. The case is white gold at 41 mm across and 13.6 mm thick, and the dial is blue guilloche and flinque enamel. It is no longer part of the current collection.
The case measures 41 mm across and 13.6 mm thick in white gold, and holding a striking watch of this complexity under fourteen millimetres is the engineering claim that matters most here. Chiming watches are normally thick because the gongs, the striking train and the governor all need room, and a grande sonnerie needs more of all three than a repeater does. White gold gives the case the density and finish a dress watch wants while remaining a reasonable medium for sound, and the Supersonnerie work exists specifically to make the chime carry outward from a wristwatch rather than being absorbed by the case around it. The dial is blue guilloche and flinque enamel, and the two words describe a sequence rather than two separate treatments. Guilloche is a pattern cut into the metal of the dial on a rose engine, so the texture is physical and cut by hand. Flinque enamel is then fired over that cut surface as translucent enamel, so the pattern shows through the glass rather than being covered by it. The result is a dial where a hand-cut texture is suspended beneath a fired layer, which is among the oldest and most difficult decorative techniques in watchmaking and is almost never attempted on a complicated watch, because a failed firing destroys not just the enamel but the engraving underneath it. The hands are white gold. The inner bezel is black lacquer, framing the blue without competing with it. The strap is textured black leather with a white gold folding clasp. Textured leather rather than alligator is worth registering on a watch at this level, since alligator is the default at every price above a certain point and choosing otherwise is a decision rather than an economy. A textured calf surface is flatter and less ostentatious than a scaled hide, and on a reference whose dial already carries a hand-engraved pattern under fired enamel, a second texture competing at the wrist would have been one too many. The folding clasp keeps the strap in a closed loop, which suits a watch its owner handles deliberately and often.
The function set is a grande sonnerie, a petite sonnerie and a minute repeater, with hours, minutes and small seconds. The three chiming modes are selectable and do different things. In grande sonnerie the watch strikes the hours and the quarters automatically at every quarter. In petite sonnerie it strikes the hours only, which is quieter and uses far less energy. The minute repeater then chimes the exact time on demand, sounding hours, quarters and remaining minutes. A carillon means the striking runs on more than the usual two gongs, which allows a fuller and more musical sequence than the two-note pattern most repeaters use. This is the top of watchmaking rather than the top of a collection, and there is no date and no additional complication because there is neither room nor reason for one.
Within Audemars Piguet's structure Code 11.59 was launched as a third pillar alongside the Royal Oak and the Royal Oak Offshore, and it is the only one of the three not built around an octagonal bezel and an integrated bracelet. Within the line the 26397 grande sonneries sit at the absolute top, above the 26395 minute repeaters, the 26396 tourbillons, the 26394 perpetual calendars and everything below them. That a collection introduced as a design statement now carries a grande sonnerie is the strongest available answer to the criticism it received at launch. The same Supersonnerie acoustic work appears across the repeaters in this collection and in the Royal Oak Concept, and the grande sonnerie is where it is asked to do the most.
This reference is for a collector at the end of a long road rather than the start of one. A grande sonnerie is not a watch anyone buys early, and the audience for one is measured in dozens rather than thousands. It also has to be lived with rather than simply owned, since the striking modes are a daily decision and the watch behaves differently depending which is selected. The guilloche and flinque dial is the second reason to want this particular execution, being a technique the industry reserves for its most serious pieces and one that could not be repaired if it failed. Now that the reference has left the catalogue the production is closed, and grande sonneries are made in numbers so small that any given configuration is effectively unique in the market. The buyer is someone who wants the hardest watch made and wants it to look like a plain blue dress watch.
