François-Bernard Mâche: There's no plot as such, apart from birth, life, death and birth again, since a child returns at the end. The theme is the confrontation of the commonplace and commonplaces in their generalities, or, more symbolically, the renunciation of the militant modernity that was dedicated to perpetual innovation.

Bruno Serrou: In 1976, the year this play was created, musical theater was triumphant.

François-Bernard Mâche: It was indeed the heyday of Avignon. A fantastic opportunity was offered to composers, thanks to the initiative of personalities like Guy Erismann, who, on France-Culture, supported this project and inspired the desire to create something new, since opera was very much in disrepute at the time. We were still in the period of degeneration of the genre, which meant that when I was a student at the Conservatoire, we were begged to go and fill the ranks of the Opéra. It was well known that opera was an obsolete genre, a courtly art form with its own conventions and clichés, while the courts had disappeared, so something else had to be invented. A new concept emerged in the aftermath of May '68, which would blossom over the next ten years. It was a period of brilliant creation, of which history has kept no clear trace, due to a lack of recordings, revivals and testimonials. But musical theater, which has often been discredited since opera's return to favour, was a real adventure, with works that were often far more interesting than most of the operas that followed. In Da capo, I wanted to integrate a wide variety of means, for example, a ballet made with instruments built for this purpose, in the spirit of my 1963 Coïncidences, an immense sound set through which the actor-dancers moved. Xavier Darasse played a marvellous musical clown, jumping and dancing as he played on the keys of a gigantic keyboard. Against a background of recorded waves, a young naked couple danced to superb choreography by Susan Buirge. Added to this were speeches that presented themselves as the wrecks of language, a highly advanced caricature of Lacan's speech, sex-shop flyers and other literary by-products. The work was not revived because of its cumbersome and complicated set-up. In some scenes, the score consists in organizing pathways through the sound set, where various simultaneous actions take place. This requires a particularly precise set-up, necessitating a two-week immobilization of the stage. This kind of servitude is impossible in most theaters. So, Da capo is out.

Bruno Serrou: What is the difference between musical theater and opera?

François-Bernard Mâche: There's a major overall difference, and that's that in opera, the music supports and accompanies the action while remaining in the pit, or even backstage. In musical theater, on the other hand, the music is on stage, becoming the action. The instrumental part becomes part of the show. In Da Capo, I used medieval instruments, some of them very spectacular. When you see a double-bass bombard carried by two people, it's theater even before the instrument has been played. I had also imagined and built a few instruments myself, for example a metallophone that was neither a glockenspiel nor a vibraphone, and ended up with an instrument of metal angle bars with resonators that sounded quite different. For another, I asked a builder of regal organs, a set of reeds, to prepare separate pipes for me to create a gigantic "hocket", where each of the participants played his or her note at the appropriate moment, creating a polyphony of regal pipes. I was reminded of the famous Russian bassoons of the late 19th century, for which a landowner had asked his moujiks to each learn to play a note, until they had acquired such coordination that they played very complicated pieces to perfection, each placing his note at the right moment. I'd have liked to take this research a step further with humorous shows. I consider a good musical clown act to be the pinnacle of musical theater, because it demands perfection of execution, perpetual invention and virtuosity, which for me is one of the peaks of the art.

Bruno Serrou: So what was missing was a de Funès musician?

François-Bernard Mâche: Yes! Because you need people of great talent, very long development times and great theatrical resources to be able to commit fully to a project. Some composers have succeeded in doing this, and have more or less specialized in musical theater, the most indisputable being Mauricio Kagel in Germany, and Georges Aperghis in France. For my part, I've only come close to this genre on three occasions.

Bruno Serrou: Did you write the libretto for Da capo?

François-Bernard Mâche: Yes, but is it a libretto? It's more a montage of found objects that I scripted.

Bruno Serrou: What's the play about?

François-Bernard Mâche: The life of man, of humanity in general, condensed into two hours. What a vast subject! Apprenticeship, education as training, the factory, love, war, a subject treated as a pochade in the spirit of May 68. Continuous derision, with a few oases, since certain sequences, such as the dance to the rhythm of the waves, are more poetic.

Bruno Serrou: Do you leave room for improvisation, or is everything written down?

François-Bernard Mâche: Everything is written.

Bruno Serrou: How many characters?

François-Bernard Mâche: Between ten and fifteen actors-dancers, actors-singers.

Bruno Serrou: Did you condemn the opera genre at the time?

François-Bernard Mâche: Yes, if only for practical reasons, as the technical, union and social constraints attached to it made it unsuitable for the inventiveness I needed. I could never have produced a work comparable to Da Capo in an opera house, whatever the means at my disposal.

Bruno Serrou: In 1970, Zimmermann took the opera genre to a new level with his Soldats. Were you aware of this at the time?

François-Bernard Mâche: No, and I don't think the work was performed in France at the time.

Bruno Serrou: In fact, we had to wait until 1984 and the Festival Musica de Strasbourg to see it programmed in our country.

François-Bernard Mâche: By 1984, musical theater was already dead.

Bruno Serrou: What kind of actors do you use in this work?

François-Bernard Mâche: Some belonged to other worlds. Armande Altaï, for example, went on to a career as a variety singer.

Bruno Serrou: Were you influenced in any way by the Living Theatre?

François-Bernard Mâche: Nudity on stage was part of the zeitgeist, part of a movement of symbolic liberation.

Bruno Serrou: The Living Theater also played on improvisation. 
 
François-Bernard Mâche: There was nothing improvised about my work.

Bruno Serrou: Everything was really set up. Did you have fun composing this piece? 

François-Bernard Mâche: Yes, it was fun, and it was fun for the audience too. The piece was a great success, but only three or four performances.

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.250-254