F-B.Mâche in Colmar: "Sensitivity and expressiveness above all else".

"Good composers are dead composers, as they used to say about Indians in the United States...".
If the phrase is (obviously) intended to be ironic, we can nonetheless detect (and without difficulty) a hint of bitterness. For François-Bernard Mâche
 It sums up quite well the situation of the composer in today's society. Not the composer of songs or variety shows, but the composer of so-called "serious" contemporary music. And François-Bernard Mâche is one of them.
For this native of Clermont-Ferrand, former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Doctor of Letters, teacher of French, Latin and Greek, who came to music and composition out of passion, today's music doesn't have to play the easy card.

Don't forget the essentials
- This music doesn't have to appeal to the masses, nor is it for the initiated few. It is complex and demanding. But not necessarily hermetic. It's true that some composers have forgotten that music has its own natural laws that cannot be transgressed. For me, however, the essential lies elsewhere. In sensitivity. I don't see myself as an intellectual composer. I want my music to be expressive and understandable.
François-Bernard Mâche already has some fifty works to his credit. And a dozen recordings. He is passionate about music where tape and instruments find common ground. And now, at the invitation of Pierre Barrat, he's rubbing shoulders with musical theater and opera.
- What I like here is the teamwork that musical theater requires. You're not alone in your ivory tower. It's true that there are problems to be solved: how do you make a text sing? Words don't just have a literary meaning. They also have a musical meaning.
It's this musical meaning that François-Bernard Mâche likes to track down. Language is also (and above all) music. That's why in "Temboctou", the composer will have an Etruscan text sung. And that he has sung Lycian. Dead languages. The precise meaning of words gives way to musicality. And that's why, when we hear François-Bernard Mâche's music, we think of a music of today and (also) of a music of all times. That of the times when man discovered music.

                                  IGOR Les dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace June 17, 1982

Excellent Colmar premiere of "Temboctou", or an imaginary journey

With the premiere of Temboctou (to music by François-Bernard Mâche), the Atelier lyrique du Rhin completed - on Wednesday in Colmar - the first stage of its journey in the company of explorer René Caillié, who (in 1827) was the first to return alive from the then mysterious city of Timbuktu, in the heart of Black Africa. The second stage will be at the Festival d'Avignon in July.

A journey, then, as subject, theme and very heart of a production that encompasses theater and music, song and speech. But not a real, material journey: a journey that comes to us from the past, a journey that is already imaginary (as it must have been for Caillié's contemporaries, who had only an imagined, almost mythical representation of Timbuktu). The only person to have experienced the reality of this voyage was, of course, Caillié himself. It is between these two journeys, one real, the other imaginary, that the Atelier Lyrique's new production must pass.
This is precisely what Pierre Barrat's staging - at times sober and clear, at other times dreamlike and teeming - and Bernard Chartreux's text (too dense at times) indicate, throughout the sixteen "stations" of what appears to be a veritable Passion, from René Caillié's childhood to his return to his sister Céleste, via the journey (experienced and re-experienced in the imagination, in memory) to Timbuktu. So much for theater and words.

      Remarkable

Music, on the other hand - a universal language - doesn't face the same problems, and finds it easier to express both clarity and obscurity. In other words, F-B. Mâche's music not only plays an essential role in Temboctou, but even more so, it seems to be the driving force behind the whole, as well as the inseparable link between the dramatic actions, whether dreamt or real. Whether instrumental, sung (solos, ensembles, children's choir) or spoken, it is - even in its silences - the very "breath" of this show.
This is another indication of F-B. Mâche's success, even if the composer never seeks the easy way out, quite the contrary... with a few fresh "breezes", however, such as what is written for the children or the bridge duet. But what beauty there is in these vast ascents of sound (in the boat trip, in particular), of formidable tension, set to throbbing percussion (the only truly African element in the score, remarkably rendered by Alain Chaleard). The musicians, moreover, handled their (oh so complex) task extremely well, with a special mention for the "Loïnhdana" ensemble and trombonists Daniel Bruley and Jean-Pol Marchand.
The performers were also outstanding, with Christian Tréguier (René Caillié) a sovereign, as good a singer as he was an actor of great intensity, Laure Florentin (Céleste) deserving of high praise in both singing and acting, Christian Davesnes with his full voice and strong personality, Esther Lamandier with her bewitching voice and fascinating presence, and Evelyne Razimovsky with her crystal-clear voice. Not forgetting Patrick Minard, Anne-Laure Poulain, Michel Lecoq, Florence Limon and Philippe Devine. And the children and adults (all amateurs) involved in ALR's work. As did Isabel Echarri and Diego Etcheverry (designers of a beautiful set). Annick Minck (musical direction), Gilberte Tsaï (staging), Georges Vanet (lighting), etc., all artisans of a new and beautiful adventure of the Atelier lyrique, an adventure which, let us emphasize, avoids in its rigor any African "folklore" or adulterated tourist imagery.

                 Latest Nouvelles d'Alsace June 18, 1982

Journey to the impossible elsewhere

Among today's French composers, François-Bernard Mâche is one of those most attracted by extra-European music, closer than our own to those natural sounds whose synthesis with the sounds of our musical culture constitutes the most original aspect of his research.
With the choice of a highly original subject, we could have expected a great deal from this new Mâche-Barrat collaboration, following on from Mangeurs d'ombre. Our partial disappointment is due above all to Bernard Chartreux, author of the (too) voluminous Temboctou libretto.
The subject remains fascinating: the tragic destiny of René Caillié, an ex-convict who became one of the pioneers in the exploration of Africa's interior at the dawn of the 19th century, at a time when this continent, apart from its coasts, was still a large white spot on atlases. This enlightened man, full of complexes and eager to surpass himself, had one obsession: to reach Timbuktu, a mythical, forbidden and inaccessible city.
To achieve this, Caillié disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim, and for years shared the incredibly miserable conditions of the African travelers themselves. The stages of his ordeal are all rites of passage, as many self-strippings. And when, at the end of a thousand tribulations, he comes within sight of the fabulous city, it's nothing more than a village shorn of its former splendor. That's where the first half of the show ends, with the sudden collapse of a tension that has gradually become unbearable - and remains so, given the absence of any liberating catharsis.
The story could end there, but the chalice has not yet been drunk to the dregs: there is the ordeal of the long return journey across the Sahara, where the physical and moral destruction of Caillié ends, as the hostile, inviolate Africa rejects him, a barely human wreck, in Tangier. Then there is the supreme mockery of the triumphant welcome given in Paris to a definitive absentee.
René Caillié's Passion offered a librettist a magnificent subject. But Bernard Chartreux ruined it all by falling into the French musical theater plague of excessive literature. Mâche's music, often remarkable, sometimes of exceptional beauty, is literally submerged by a verbal torrent, lacking scenic rhythm and dramatic articulation. Where this logorrhea temporarily calms down, the music can take flight, and these are also the best moments of Pierre Barrat's staging, which constantly tries to save the unsalvageable and sometimes succeeds.
The role of Caillié is played by Christian Tréguier, an emaciated, hallucinated figure with ascetic temples. The vocal cast included Esther Lamandier as Antinéa, the symbol of the inviolable, ever-stealing African woman, and above all the astonishing Evelyne Razimovsky as Passerelle, Chienne and Lilith, as well as Laure Florentin as Céleste, Caillié's antinomic yet complementary sister, riveted to her provincial village.
Mâche's score gives pride of place to voices, soloists and choirs (including a children's choir). The instrumental part makes highly original use of a small ensemble of ancient instruments, the Ensemble Loinhdana, grouping bowed fiddle, oboe, flute, chalemie and percussion. Mâche emphasizes the links between our medieval music and its partly Arabic sources. Two trombones, a clarinet and a guitar complete the modest instrumentation, but an important protagonist of the score is the computer, or more precisely the real-time digital processor, which enables fascinating transmutations of vocal and instrumental sounds. Without doubt, the most original and substantial passages of the score are to be found in the sequences of the journey itself (second half of the first part), with powerful evocations of the African landscape, both its natural sounds (animal, vegetable, atmospheric) and its traditional music, rightly perceived by Mâche as an extension of the previous ones.

                              Harry Halbreich La Croix July 6, 1982

...all these languages are to be judged in the name of theater and the indispensable relationship between the real and the imaginary: onirism and utopia are the mirrors of realism and above all constitute a reading of memory. Otherwise, there's bad theater and orphan music, and they're not about to fall in love.
Mirage, tragedy, melodrama
In its fourteen years of experience, the Festival d'Avignon is well aware of these fundamental facts, and is constantly analyzing them. But it has a hard time convincing creators (composers and playwrights) to be aware of the pitfalls that await them. The concepts of memory and mirrors are precisely at the heart of François-Bernard Mâche's work Temboctou, based on the story of René Caillié, a character torn between the need for an elsewhere and nostalgia for home, a contradiction that can only be resolved through the power of the imagination. Only music can mediate this conflict, reducing the two images of the same dream into a single human image: Saharan mirages are matched by sonic mirages.
                                                             				  Guy Erismann

Like every year, France-Culture plays an active part in the Festival, bringing in its wake a whole stream of programs and shows marked by the greatest novelty. Indeed, if there's one genre that France-Culture passionately defends, it's Musical Theatre. An art form that combines music and theater, and which, unlike opera, is currently attracting the most advanced and freshest creators.
This year, 4 shows will be presented in Avignon, in co-production with France Culture and the Festival. The first, Temboctou, was produced by the Atelier lyrique du Rhin and opens on July 11 at 9.30 pm at the Cloître des Carmes. The music, composed by François-Bernard Mâche, takes us on a journey through an imaginary Africa, based on an account of a 19th-century voyage by a forgotten explorer, René Caillié.
Writer Bernard Chartreux has taken this story and turned it into a theatrical text whose sounds will blend organically with the music, and which will be sung and spoken by 10 actor-singers. Eight musicians will also take to the stage, amidst a children's choir from Colmar schools and a group of amateurs. This is the novelty of the show, which, under the direction of specialists from the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin, has brought a whole host of activities to the city of Colmar. The theme of the show was nomadism, the imaginary voyage of Africa seen from the angle of dreams, and the famous Temboctou around which this exotic and poetic work revolves.
Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï were asked to bring together text, images and music in a meaningful staging. This 19th-century voyage to Timbuktu will undoubtedly join the great myth of contemporary wandering, as experienced by poets such as Rimbaud and Kerouac, as well as a whole younger generation. Here, exoticism meets modernity.

                                         Le Méridional, July 10 1982

Temboctou, the spellbinding magic of a journey to an unknown land...

Temboctou is the first work of musical theater to be presented this summer in Avignon. With music by François-Bernard Mâche and text by Bernard Chartreux, the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin recounts the journey of the first white man to Temboctou. His name was René Caillié.
Leaving, then, is man's eternal whim. Staying, no less eternal a necessity for old men. Caillié, who was truly the first white man to discover the "fabulous" city of Temboctou at the end of the 19th century, becomes the pretext for an original and beautiful work of musical theater.
For once, the genre seems to have been mastered. Pierre Barrat, who directed the show, has succeeded in finding an aesthetically pleasing way out of the current difficulty of reconciling song and theater, word and sound.
Conveying all the poetry of the text to the audience through the music is a gamble that we take every summer in Avignon. Rarely, however, has the marriage been so happy.
This is not to say that everything is perfect.
The spectator may feel slightly frustrated by the impression of "losing the thread" of a story that is rich in poetic imagery.
But the essential is there. Thanks to the singer-actors, thanks to the musicians who play tunes inspired by African or Arabic melodies on stage, thanks to the chorus, thanks to the sets and costumes, whose sumptuous simplicity fills the stage with distant imaginary worlds.
For two and a half hours, we follow this dreamlike itinerary, more psychological than geographical, more poetic than realistic, and experience the spellbinding magic of this happy marriage of sound, song, gesture and image.
Temboctou: a "voyage en chambre" show that makes you want to meditate on the deeper reasons behind our desire to travel. Caillié, who builds his entire adventure on an imaginary vision of a fantastic Temboctou, will be disappointed to find that it's nothing more than a village of shabby huts. Isn't that what awaits us all, when we think we'll find elsewhere what we don't have here?

                        Luc Henri Fage Vaucluse Matin July 13 1982

Musical theater at the Cloïtre des Carmes: "Temboctou". Music resists travel.

"Temboctou" is the first Théâtre Musical work to be performed this summer, produced jointly by France-Culture, the Avignon Festival and the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin. It has the merit of bringing together professionals and amateurs alike, and of remaining enthusiastic throughout.
In truth, "Temboctou" takes up an idea as young as the world, that of the journey to a foreign land, where the vicissitudes of the quest mingle with the dazzle of new sensations. The real hero of this journey, a certain René Caillié, the son of a convict who lived in the 19th century, follows in the footsteps of such great wandering poets as Rimbaud, Kerouac and, closer to home, Kenneth White. It is along these difficult lines that the author of the text, Bernard Chartreux, the directors Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, and the composer of the music, François-Bernard Mâche, have conceived their show. A line that links life and poetry, the journey and the inner quest, the real and the imaginary. But for some reason, the show, as presented to us on Sunday at the Cloître des Carmes, doesn't reach these dimensions. 
It does show us a hero struggling with his dreams and the difficulties of the African road. The show also skilfully blends exotic scenes with interior scenes featuring members of the Caillié family who have remained in France. However, even with this comparison, the journey fails to engage us. The image of Africa we are presented with is no more than a postcard mirage.
The show's colors are merely illustrative, verging on the naive. The only thing that stands out is the music. Starting from every corner of the stage, and composed of sound effects, psalmodies and recitations, it composes an extremely rich and diverse sound paste for the ear. Children's choirs take part. The song of insects, the melodies of voices...resonate in the evening like a call. This is undoubtedly the real journey.
        
A.D., "Vaucluse-Avignons-Actualités" newspaper column July 13, 1982

Two dreams confronted

Musical theater is evolving more and more towards a kind of symbolic language. In the staging, it juxtaposes visual "signs" that put us on the track of concrete action, but distorted according to the particular sensibility of the drama's heroes. In the music, he contrasts rhapsody - essential for prolonging the local color already asserted by the set - with a symphony of harmonies, timbres and rhythms in which we must recognize the dissonances, anxieties and emotions of the characters embarking on the adventure. The eye and ear, if they manage to adapt to this obligatory dichotomy, simultaneously perceive concrete impressions and abstract information, sometimes complementary, often contradictory. But life is generally rich in such complications.
Musician François-Bernard Mâche had the good idea of choosing as the theme of his libretto the voyage to Timbuktu of amateur explorer René Caillié, who in the 19th century was the first European to discover the black, Muslim city of Sudan. He set off like one drifting towards a mirage, a certain Antinea. He discovered a civilization. But he received this civilization as if it were his own, sometimes seeing the right thing because he was liberal and eager to understand, sometimes retreating into his European heritage because he was afraid, because he was sick and losing his ability to welcome.
And all this can be heard in Mâche's music, which blends tam-tams from elsewhere with the rustle of electronic music. Thunder and rain become melody, and the rhythms of unknown languages give birth to sounds that breathe meaning into them. I'm not going to tell you that the approach to such a work is simple. In fact, a fascinating evening can be spent contenting oneself with what one sees, and neglecting the sensitive, psychological counterpoint woven into the score.
But if you take the trouble to get to the heart of the system, you'll be able to forgive some of the length, which, it seems to me, is easy to erase. The result is a work that confronts the sensibilities of two cultures, two worlds, two dreams, with a hyper-professionalism of stagecraft and psychology.
Experimental theater, perhaps, but already largely operational.

                         Claude Baignères Figaro July 13, 1982

The performance machine. After Mnouchkine in the Cour d'Honneur, "Temboctou" at Les Carmes
African fantasy, from dream to reality
Africa in the early 19th century was a dark enigma to be tamed. René Caillié, a poor, self-taught young peasant, disguised as an Arab, crosses the desert to reach Timbuktu, the city of mirages. This feverish dreamer, who paved the way for the expeditionary corps, recorded the story of his journey in a book. Maspéro has just republished it (collection "La Découverte"). The last century is a mine, barely disused today. And yet... Only one hundred years separate Gide's "Voyage à Tombouctou" (Journey to Timbuktu) from Leiris's "L'Afrique fantôme" (Phantom Africa), to say nothing of the pages in which Céline vomits Africa. But what didn't he vomit?
Before the rape
Rightly fascinated, Chartreux sees in Caillié a brother of Rimbaud, fleeing to Harrar. Caillié's language, in the raw ingenuity of a thirsty quest, thus catalogues the harsh desire of the myth preceding colonial rape. Chartreux sees a "passion" in the odyssey of the man who, blinded by the mirage, discovers in the end that he is nothing but sand, and returns to his homeland to die...
François-Bernard Mâche grafts a skilfully structured score onto this stimulating project, blending recorded "natural" sounds with a written instrumental and vocal part (marrying the "nobility" of the trombone with the roughness of the double bass...).
The length of the Carmes cloister is taken up, with the audience on either side. We quickly realize that the blurring of codes that we've come to expect in "musical theater" - a genre with ill-defined, yet open-ended contours - only works in fits and starts. We sense the flaying of intention. It is not validated on stage. We hear a text, we listen to music. Most of the time, it's just a juxtaposition. At best, the dialectic is timid. A certain bric-a-brac obliterates the space (mannequins, deckchairs and Louis XV armchairs...). The actor-singer-musicians seem hampered. As Bedouins, they are unbelievable. The division of labor doesn't just fade away in wishful thinking. Christian Tréguier (René Caillié), however, is firm in his enlightenment. Evelyne Razimovsky (La Chienne, then Lilith) finely theatricalizes her vocal score. A superb "negro" mourning chorus closes the first part.
But it falls short of expectations. The device is too clumsy for the fluidity of the mirage. The virtues of the text (novelistic in the best sense of the word, with a slightly dry lyricism); Mâche's music, with its assertive, thoughtful concreteness; Annick Minck's clear direction, and the goodwill of all, do not prevent the object from remaining diligent.

                                          Jean-Pierre Léonardini L'Humanité July 13, 1982

If you've been to Temboctou...
Musical theater exists. Every summer, it takes place in a cloister in Avignon. Pierre Barrat, Gilberte Tsaï, François-Bernard Mâche and Bernard Chartreux have joined forces to offer a pleasant African evening.

Rochefort-sur-Mer, its narrow streets, convicts and naval officers, and Timbuktu, the mysterious, the inviolate: these are the two poles of the show by composer François-Bernard Mâche, writer Bernhard Chartreux and director Pierre Barrat (collaborating for the occasion with Gilberte Tsaï), which opened Avignon's musical theater at the Cloître des Carmes. Now in its fourteenth year, this is a classic collaboration between the festival and France-Culture. After all, it was inaugurated in 1969 at certain Orden, foreshadowing the bitter debates that would later pit enemies and supporters of "musical theater" against each other as an indispensable means of expression.
Today, the question is as topical as ever. Thanks to Marie-Noël Rio and Michel Rostain's highly personal analysis of the subject, recently published by Recherches in L'Opéra mort ou vif. And, above all, thanks to a program that moves between the venerable Théâtre Municipal and its heat-insulating velvet seats, the Célestins cloister and the Condition des Soies. Between now and August 6, you'll be able to discover three other works from this genre so difficult to define: Winnie, by the unsurpassable tandem of Pier'Alli and Sylvano Bussotti, Bernard Cavanna's Ion (after Euripides) and Récitations, the last of Georges Aperghis' many children.
But, as things are moving along, the area around the Palais des Papes will soon be as torrid as the lands once visited by Charles de Foucault, so let's get back to Temboctou. And not Timbuktu, to respect the spelling chosen by the authors and René Caillié, the young self-taught peasant from the Poitevin marshes whose story they have decided to tell us. In 1827, three years before the Algerian expedition decreed by Louis-Philippe, Rimbaud's immediate ancestor set out to discover this mythical city. After battling desert, scurvy and all manner of ills, he finally discovered it and wrote his famous Voyage à Temboctou. But he soon found it insignificant. Hence his return to France and the dreary hours he spent with his sister Céleste, a limping, Balzacian countrywoman consumed by a terrible sense of possession and incestuous tendencies.
The meaning of this lamentable Odyssey, recounted by Bernard Chartreux, the author of Palais de Justice, and his team-mates, is translucent: it speaks to our periodic taste for the roadless. And our disappointment once we've reached our goal, because, except perhaps in China, the imaginary is always far more powerful than strict reality. Didn't the "backpackers" and other hippies of the sixties have to experience this on the roads, so often sublimated, of Kathmandu and elsewhere?
This painful dichotomy, skilfully underscored by Pierre Barrat's polished staging and a pleasing set design by Isabel Echarri and Diego Etcheverry (the set designers of Carmen in...Peking), also brings with it concerns which, though secondary, are no less interesting. These include endemic, pretentious colonialism, which will inevitably lead to the loss of Indochina and Algeria, a disgusting superiority complex expressed in the so-called "civilized" object that is René Caillié's umbrella-refuge, and an underlying nostalgia for the 19th century. The latter is currently very much in vogue, as it was already present in a certain Liebestod presented at the last Biennale de Nanterre.
With Temboctou, François-Bernard Mâche has renewed ties with Avignon, forged in 1976 and 1979 with Da Capo and Mangeurs d'ombre. His participation, which is very much musical theater in the original sense of the term, in that it illustrates a range of very different dramatic situations, is a kind of portrait of the interests that have always attracted him. The linguist and semiologist shines through in Etruscan phrases, the chants of the natives observing René Caillié and the onomatopoeia uttered by the bourgeois dear to Guizot.
Various incantations, vocal rites and rhythms drummed by members of the Loïndhana group, an ensemble of medievalist musicians who also play the fiddle, denote the humanities specialist. As for the storm and the noises coming from a magnetic tape, the conversations and melodies transiting through a computer in real time, they evoke François-Bernard Mâche's fruitful collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer. Performed by a team of singers led by the redheaded Annick Minck, and including Christian Tréguier, Michel Lecoq, Patrick Minard and Philippe Devine, they often converge on nostalgia for elsewhere. A concept embodied by the beautiful Esther Lamandier, who has temporarily left early music to become the character of Antinéa, a mirage of exotic vocalizations...

                             Philippe Olivier Libération July 14, 1982

"Temboctou" by François-Bernard Mâche. Dazzling music, finely tuned staging and a dream of Africa.

If musical theater is a contested genre, if sometimes its existence is even doubted, Temboctou, the France-Culture and Festival d'Avignon production, has just brilliantly demonstrated the contrary. This musical success, this realistic yet symbolic staging, and the charm of this show are due to a close-knit team: François-Bernard Mâche, for the music, Pierre Barrat for the staging, assisted by Gilberte Tsaï, on a limpid and beautiful text by Bernard Chartreux, based on the stories of René Caillié.
Temboctou, the real name of Timbuktu: in the heyday of nascent colonialism, early in the 19th century, a little peasant boy named René Caillié dreams in class. He dreams of geography. He dreams of geography. He dreams of a city of water, home to an unattainable woman, Antinéa. A young blond boy sings Antinéa's song in a nursery rhyme voice, in the naivety of an Epinal image.
The Epinal image persists. As an adult, René Caillié is fascinated by Africa. He leaves. On stage, the Balsatian pomp of the French Provençal bourgeoisie is replaced by caravans, turbans, water carriers, bales of grain and junk: a voyage.
Voyage", wrote Lévi-Strauss at the start of Tristes tropiques, "what you send back to us is our own garbage thrown in the face of humanity. René Caillié will go as far as Timbuktu, meeting fat, beautiful women who tirelessly eat rice, meeting scouts, or entire tribes. In Timbuktu, there's nothing. A woman perhaps, the eternal Eve, with a vulture's eye fixed on her head or elsewhere. The traveler's corpse will return home alive: but a corpse, in other words, emptied of its substance by the journey itself.
Such is the plot. François-Bernard Mâche's music follows from voice to voice, from chorus to chorus, the passage from bourgeois France to the deep sounds of Africa.
Water drums, improvised balafons, rattles, percussion and women's voices make for a dream of Africa: not quite real, yet it feels like it. It's the kind of Africa that teenagers in crisis dream of as they try to become adults. Rimbaud in utopia to grow, grow and find who knows what. Mâche's marvellous music sings of this illness. It's this imagery that Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï's perfectly poised staging describes: realism, yes, there really are bales, turbans, water, dunes, nothing to catch the eye and leave it unused. Pierre Barrat's vision is sometimes almost too much. As for Caillié, the hieratic Christian Tréguier, he oscillates between his African quest and the puppet that represents it, he the victor of Timbuktu - long live France - he the corpse.
Voyage, what you send back to us is our own garbage... You have to travel with Caillié: the despair is sublime and has the beauty of a fantasy that empties itself.

The "French infernal machine". To obtain the effects of reverberated voices that come from everywhere and nowhere, provoking African strangeness, François-Bernard Mâche used a brand-new instrument that, for once, is not Japanese but French. The DHM Publison is a real-time digital processor that transforms sound into numbers, which are then processed by computer and transformed back into sounds from elsewhere. All this sound alchemy takes place in 1/10000 of a second, and can only be perceived as instantaneous. The sung sound can also be transposed over several octaves, inverted, treated as an echo, and even transformed from spoken to sung.
This is the first time that this magical device, previously used mainly in variety shows under the name of "French infernal machine", has been used for a contemporary musical creation.

                     Catherine Clément Le matin de Paris July 14 1982

Timbuktu. Memory and imagination for structured musical theater

A journey to the end of the desert, to the last moving frontiers of the imaginary, but with rapid returns to reality, such was the itinerary of René Caillié, an explorer attracted and fascinated by the mythical Timbuktu. The show, directed by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, is based on a text by Bernard Chartreux, whose vigorous language is full of colorful, poetic images. It is divided into two main moments, with the space encompassing internal sequences chained together or extended by musical episodes (instrumental or purely vocal). Temboctou", the first music-theater show at Festival 82 and co-produced by Atelier Lyrique du Rhin, successfully combines stagecraft, gesture and voice. The live work on spoken and sung language adds an extra, almost timeless dimension to the pure recitative.
The alternation between imagined time, recreated time and real, immediate time is one of the seductions of this "opera", rich in events, simultaneous actions that are still very "legible", group movements in which the actor-singers are both actors and spectators. François-Bernard Mâche's music is very present, both in its rigorously elaborated passages (with slight electroacoustic manipulations or on instruments from popular traditions or not), and in those left to a kind of free improvisation: actors, singers and musicians are all effective, contributing to a show that - from the very first performance - is clearly defined and complete. In all the manifestations used, from the simplest to the most refined (especially on a local level), the sound material used remains, it seems to me, the supporting element, the backbone of this fresco, of this initiatory journey.

                           Nicole Salabert La Marseillaise July 15, 1982

Musical theater: enchantment in song
Every year, Avignon provides an opportunity for musical theater to assert itself. Pierre Barrat, director of the Atelier lyrique du Rhin, tells us about "Temboctou", which he directs with Gilberte Tsaï.

For many years now, Pierre Barrat has been interested in this particular form that links theater and music, without ever uttering the word opera. He founded the Théâtre musical d'Angers and devoted himself to the search for a new lyrical repertoire. For eight years now, he has been pursuing the same type of work with the Atelier lyrique du Rhin.
"Today, I prefer to speak of musical theatrical research. Our task is clear: we must enable composers and authors who want to work together to do so, and we must also enable singers and actors to take part in this research. The show he is currently presenting, Temboctou, is the result of an exemplary collaboration, based on a theme that interested him and which he sums up in these two words: "Rester, partir".
"First of all, we look for subjects likely to interest our audience, ideas and facts that concern them. And around the nomad/sedentary couple, around the story of those who leave and those who stay, many common or solitary adventures can be grafted."
Bernard Chartreux, dramaturge at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg (we salute the regional character of this work), wrote the text for Temboctou based on the extraordinary life of René Caillié, who discovered the mythical city on his own. A poor, rather shy young man, with no means, no friends, no support, he left everything behind one day and set off. Let's go! His story inspires, seduces and fascinates...
What was he thinking, one morning in 1827, to abandon his native Poitou and his sister Céleste, the one who limped, the one who stayed, while he went deep into Africa? Read the book he wrote on his return, "Le Voyage à Tombouctou", which François Maspéro recently republished. Leaving, leaving everything, coming back... We think of Rimbaud exiled in Harrar, and Céleste is a bit like Isabelle. Bernard Chartreux has turned this fabulous, dreamlike story about Africa as a mystery and our inner abysses into a tale of passion, taken up musically by François-Bernard Mâche, who says that "music and theater remain two of the rare places open to the nomadism of the imaginary".
François-Bernard Mâche's musical rendering of the real and imaginary spaces traversed by Caillié, his passage from phantom Africa to the fantasies of Africa, and the double that always haunted the explorer and adventurer, uses a computer to manipulate the sounds and introduce a light, a break, a fault. His musical inventions are not gadgets, but the result of a difficult search that is absolutely in tune with our times, our reality.
"We need to find an epochal form, a form that corresponds to us. We need new aesthetics. Today, of course, opera is back in vogue. But when we began our research, a whole generation of musicians were completely unaware of the genre." For this show, singers and actors are mixed together, and Pierre Barrat is particularly satisfied with the homogeneity of their work. The ideal, for him, would be to have a permanent troupe, which would allow everyone to reach their full potential. "Of course, there are a certain number of singers with whom I work more frequently. But this excludes them from the traditional circuits, and, for them, it's difficult."
The sixteen-strong choir is an amateur choir that has been working all year, but not just on Temboctou.
"Our mission is also one of animation, and we have organized an exhibition on the theme of "Rester-partir", in parallel with the production of the show, in collaboration with the visual artists, and in particular with those taking part in the show, architects and sociologists. For us, it's another way of making our work understood, and that remains the most important thing."

                        Armelle Héliot Le quotidien de Paris July 15, 1982

From "Temboctou" to "Romance of Mexico

Musical theater was undoubtedly launched by France Culture at Avignon, where it initially played an experimental role. It has now reached maturity, as witnessed by Temboctou, in which musician F.B.Mâche and writer Bernard Chartreux join forces. Here, the music doesn't obscure the text, but rather makes it heard. Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï's highly successful staging in the Carmes cloister sets the adventure of René Caillié, the explorer, in its intimate contradictions.
Like his soul, the playground is divided between the narrow sedentary life of his native village and the wanderings of nomads, the dream of Timbuktu and the reality of a destroyed city, the mythology of a hero and his own confusion. The journey becomes a kind of initiatory ordeal in which traditional Islamic music merges with the subtle suggestions of Mâche's sonorities...
                                                       
                                J.-J.Lerrant Le Progrès July 16, 1982

"Temboctou" at the Carmes cloister
The power of the imaginary

Who is René Caillié? An explorer, an ethnologist, a poor soul, a madman, a poet, a mystifier? Perhaps all of the above. In any case, Bernard Chartreux of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg and composer François-Bernard Mâche attempt to capture his inner adventure in an ambitious work of musical theater, premiered by the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin and France-Culture at the Avignon Festival.
Temboctou illustrates the power of the imagination over man: the geography lessons of his childhood fascinated a poor young man, the son of a convict, fixing him on the all-white "terrae incognitae" of central Africa, and the name of a fabulous city, Timbuktu, for which the author prefers the spelling Temboctou. In 1827, disguised as an Egyptian merchant, he set off to Timbuktu to assert himself, perhaps even to exist, through terrible adventures, writing down his travel impressions for a geography society, and returning after a dreadful desert crossing, broken, destroyed, half-mad and unconscious. A fabulous and miserable adventure in which the imaginary, now real, ended up devouring the man entirely. In the words of Bernard Chartreux, "to give an account of Caillié's journey to Timbuktu is to write a Passion".
Based on the explorer's own texts, the show evokes "initiation, trial, futile assumption, expiation" in an often fragmented lyrical form, mixing characters and times at different levels, in a rather confused way, where superb flights of fancy alternate with haunting repetitions and episodes bordering on the absurd. Bernard Chartreux has undoubtedly allowed himself to be taken too much by the idea that Caillié was a sort of Rimbaud "who only knew how to live and die his Illuminations and his Saison en enfer", and inflicts on us, notably in the scurvy scene, a verbal delirium of the worst literature.
But the show directed by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï retains an undeniable power, embodied above all by Christian Tréguier, a René Caillié hallucinated and hallucinating in inner truth, and a large cast (under the musical direction of Annick Minck), who bring to life these ghosts of Tuaregs and mythical Blacks, in particular Esther Lamandier, whose guttural voice, full of mysterious reflections, symbolizes the mythical Antinea, the female face of this Africa that obsesses the traveler.
The music of François-Bernard Mâche, whose research has often tended towards a "confrontation between nature and culture", is, one might say, an imaginary ethnomusicology like the ethnography of Caillié himself: Africa seen through the fantasies of the European. But he has created beautiful sonic atmospheres and moments of great lyricism, with simple means, haunting drumming, percussion on various materials, ancient instruments with strange sounds and trombones with long, mysterious, initiatory cries. The use of a computer, a real-time digital processor, enables curious echo effects, multiplication and drifting of sounds, but also of speech, contributing to the splitting of personalities in different times (before, during and after the action).
The melodies of l'Afrique imaginaire are often quite beautiful, even if sometimes excessively sought-after, but the composer has failed to make the dramatic characters sing in false or banal recitatives devoid of lyricism. And yet, through the trial and error, outrageousness and naivety of this show, a breath of fresh air passes and a face is revealed: that of a grandiose and derisory man who well deserved to be known.

                       Jacques Longchampt Le Monde July 17, 1982

What makes us sedentary? What is it that, from time to time, puts us travelers at risk on the roads that lie beyond our reach ? What drives us on these roads to the other side of the world, and what are we looking for?
At the dawn of the 19th century, René Caillié became an explorer, fascinated by Africa and, more specifically, the famous Temboctou to which countless golden legends are attached. To do so, he suffered the rigors of the penal colony and, with his bare feet, wrote a kind of Passion. To accomplish his journey, he chose to go forward masked. His enterprise is based on lies, risks and punishment.
As for the music, better than ever, it recounts not only René Caillié's journey, but that of his imagination. "As composer Fr.B.Mâche explains, "Today, when we see the field of travel shrinking to the dimensions of a skull, it is music and theater that remain one of the few places open to the nomadism of the imagination.
This unreal space is rendered through the use of a computer, a real-time digital processor, employed for the first time in a performance. The manipulation of sound, as it occurs, creates an echo system that allows voices and instruments to "nomadize outside their natural limits", as the musician puts it. The text, designed to elicit song, sometimes calls on very special techniques and the use of Etruscan, yodelling and dead languages. The echo is also reflected in the quality of the instrumental sound, which relies heavily on rare instruments from the Middle Ages.

(Xavier Lacavalerie ?) Télérama n°1696, program of July 21 1982 on France-Culture

Impressions d'Afrique

Co-produced by the Atelier lyrique du Rhin, the Festival d'Avignon and France-Culture, François-Bernard Mâche's latest work opened the new series of musical theater that Avignon has been hosting for many years...
Judging by the debate that followed one of the performances, Temboctou, based on a text by Bernard Chartreux and directed by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, is far from unanimously acclaimed. But this debate has no end, and no real means. Intellectual, that is.
At the dawn of the 19th century, when the map of Africa was still full of "terrae incognitae", René Caillié dreamed of Timbuktu. He set off, and his journey slowly turned into a way of the cross. All the more so as his entire project was based on a lie: making people believe he was a Muslim.
Needless to say, the actors have drawn many parallels from Caillié's travels (reprinted by Maspero): Rimbaud, Kerouac, the double, the creator's lie... Barrat, with his usual finesse and conviction, uses the usual symbols: puppets representing the double, models of oriental buildings representing the "desire for Africa"...
Despite the overpowering text and crudely contrived staging, Mâche's music sometimes manages to plunge the listener into that bizarre state we used to call melancholy. Images of African music, simulacrum of percussion, dreams of incantation. The failure of Caillié's experiment lies entirely in the distance Mâche manages to establish between the idea of sonorous Africa and the everyday reality of Caillié singing and listening. Sickness, pain and death, his highs of solitude, populate, embrace and gnaw at him. The mythical Timbuktu is but a muddy village. Voices come unstuck, sounds fall apart, images explode. The dream ends in death, in silence and dryness. It's not Rimbaud, it's Charles de Foucauld.
 
               Jacques Drillon Nouvel Observateur July 31-August 6, 1982

Avignon: Short-breathed breaths
...three shows, crammed to the gills with scenic and musical finds, that succeeded only in distilling boredom.
Take, for example, François-Bernard Mâche's Temboctou, based on a text by Bernard Chartreux, freely adapted from Voyage à Tombouctou, written by explorer René Caillié during his trip to Africa. The libretto is sumptuous, at times recalling Rimbaldian flights of fancy or the violent images of Jacques Vaché.
The music, for all its modernism (real-time synthesis of voices) and clever effects (unusual marriage of certain timbres, suggestive use of percussion), carries the heavy scent of spices and the odors of African earth and rain. In short, for the spectator who's always ready to marvel, it's magic. A change of scenery. A party. All the more so since the staging, by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, and the performers and singers admirably serve this crazy story of desire, travel and mirages.
But then disaster strikes: a long "tunnel" screamed rather than shouted by the main protagonist, who is plagued by illness and hallucinations; a completely useless second half, during which the action gets bogged down and the music wears itself out in incessant repetition. The whole thing just falls flat on its face. At three-quarters of an hour, we had a little masterpiece. But it's a long time, three-quarters of an hour of big talk.

                       Xavier Lacavalerie Télérama August 14-20, 1982

Explorer René Caillié decides to travel to the heart of Africa, to the forbidden city of Timbuktu. He joins a caravan, borrowing the clothes and identity of a Muslim merchant...From this (true) story in the form of an initiatory journey, Bernard Chartreux has drawn material for a concise and highly effective text, set to music by François-Bernard Mâche, which premiered at the Avignon Festival in the early 80s. Here is a new production of this opera, with staging and sets by Christian Chérézy, under the direction of Jean-Marie Adrien. All the spells of Africa are yours...

                 X.L. (Xavier Lacavalerie) Télérama n°2352, February 1995

Contemporary music. This composer finds his sound models as much in languages as in nature. "Temboctou, recreated this weekend, reflects his style.

Mâche, themes and "Temboctou
François-Bernard Mâche is a cultivated musician. In other words, he likes to connect things that might seem far apart. In 1958, at the age of 23, he joined Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de recherches musicales, while still a student at the Ecole normale de la rue d'Ulm. With a degree in Greek archaeology, this associate of arts is no stranger to cutting-edge technologies. His works, his style and even his working methods also aim to reconcile seemingly opposing elements: the Ancient (not to say the Antique) and the Modern, the East and the West, the distant and the near.
Today, François-Bernard Mâche's catalog includes some sixty works. Khnoum, Planh, Kassandra, Styx: the titles of these works speak volumes about the universe the musician has constructed. They betray a great love of Greek mythology and of the world's languages. In the latter field, he has a soft spot for languages that are about to disappear, and for those whose sounds we know but not their meaning. Emblematic of his relationship with the languages that provide models for his compositions - his Trois chants sacrés for solo voice call on Hittite, Etruscan and Gallic. The work is unsettling in its simple beauty, and in the abolition of time it establishes.
For François-Bernard Mâche, nature is also a great provider of sound models. In Korwar, one of his main works, the harpsichord plays with the croaking of frogs, the cries of birds and those of a boar in rut, as recorded, crudely, by the composer. The dialogue proceeds by imitation, until it is difficult to distinguish the partners. Here, too, the listener is left in a state of confusion: the marriage between nature and culture, country and city, dirty and clean, is born of the osmosis between the boar and the harpsichord, the aristocratic instrument par excellence. A far cry from Messiaen-style ornithology.
Revived and recreated at the Opéra-théâtre de Massy this weekend, Temboctou is a musical show that reveals many of the characteristic features of François-Bernard Mâche's style. The work tells the story of René Caillié, the explorer who discovered the city of Timbuktu in 1827 - which he called Temboctou. The opposition of cultures, the man torn between Europe and Africa, between sedentary life and nomadism, between reality and mirages: these are all coupled notions found in Bernard Chartreux's text, set to music by the composer. The choice of instruments - ancient, medieval and non-European on the one hand, electronic lutherie on the other - is a sonic extension of this.
Director Christian Cheyrezy asked the composer to remount Temboctou, first performed in 1982 at the Festival d'Avignon. Obviously, he had to make a few major changes.
For all that, the composer remains faithful to his conception of musical theater - the ideal place, according to him, for the staging of music. Opera did not appeal to him, because of its nostalgic connotations. Above all, at a time when composers are returning en masse to the operatic genre, he feels that the price to pay is too heavy and the constraints too great.

	Dominique Druhen, Libération February 11-12, 1995

"Temboctou": this is how the African trading post was first spelled by the man who discovered it in 1827. René Caillié and his "non-epopee", a fake scholar dressed up as an Egyptian Muslim merchant to cross the Sahara, inspired playwright Bernard Chartreux and composer François-Bernard Mâche to write a very curious "non-opera". Composed in 1982, it was revived for two performances by the Opéra-théâtre de Massy as part of the first Festival des arts d'aujourd'hui.
François-Bernard Mâche is one of those composers for whom the spoken word and the sounds of nature constitute the first states of a music that is nonetheless highly written, but which never really departs from those elemental germs that are the shimmer of rain, the rumor of wind and sea. The words themselves are musical, moving insensitively into song. The story of René Caillié's voyage gives rise on many occasions to these puffs of sound, sometimes moving towards the descriptive and figurative, sometimes towards pure music and abstract rhythms: the shriek of wooden chopsticks with African connotations, a threne intoned from the back of the throat in Tibetan style, an ageless melody for the role of the immortal Antinéa.
Occasionally, a computer takes over the spoken word and, through its transformations, invents an inhuman, perhaps animal language. Mâche, who is often classed as an ecological composer, fears neither sophistication nor computers.

                              Anne Rey, Le Monde, February 15, 1995		F-B.Mâche in Colmar: "Sensitivity and expressiveness above all else".

"Good composers are dead composers, as they used to say about Indians in the United States...".
If the phrase is (obviously) intended to be ironic, we can nonetheless detect (and without difficulty) a hint of bitterness. For François-Bernard Mâche
 It sums up quite well the situation of the composer in today's society. Not the composer of songs or variety shows, but the composer of so-called "serious" contemporary music. And François-Bernard Mâche is one of them.
For this native of Clermont-Ferrand, former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Doctor of Letters, teacher of French, Latin and Greek, who came to music and composition out of passion, today's music doesn't have to play the easy card.

Don't forget the essentials
- This music doesn't have to appeal to the masses, nor is it for the initiated few. It is complex and demanding. But not necessarily hermetic. It's true that some composers have forgotten that music has its own natural laws that cannot be transgressed. For me, however, the essential lies elsewhere. In sensitivity. I don't see myself as an intellectual composer. I want my music to be expressive and understandable.
François-Bernard Mâche already has some fifty works to his credit. And a dozen recordings. He is passionate about music where tape and instruments find common ground. And now, at the invitation of Pierre Barrat, he's rubbing shoulders with musical theater and opera.
- What I like here is the teamwork that musical theater requires. You're not alone in your ivory tower. It's true that there are problems to be solved: how do you make a text sing? Words don't just have a literary meaning. They also have a musical meaning.
It's this musical meaning that François-Bernard Mâche likes to track down. Language is also (and above all) music. That's why in "Temboctou", the composer will have an Etruscan text sung. And that he has sung Lycian. Dead languages. The precise meaning of words gives way to musicality. And that's why, when we hear François-Bernard Mâche's music, we think of a music of today and (also) of a music of all times. That of the times when man discovered music.

                                  IGOR Les dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace June 17, 1982

Excellent Colmar premiere of "Temboctou", or an imaginary journey

With the premiere of Temboctou (to music by François-Bernard Mâche), the Atelier lyrique du Rhin completed - on Wednesday in Colmar - the first stage of its journey in the company of explorer René Caillié, who (in 1827) was the first to return alive from the then mysterious city of Timbuktu, in the heart of Black Africa. The second stage will be at the Festival d'Avignon in July.

A journey, then, as subject, theme and very heart of a production that encompasses theater and music, song and speech. But not a real, material journey: a journey that comes to us from the past, a journey that is already imaginary (as it must have been for Caillié's contemporaries, who had only an imagined, almost mythical representation of Timbuktu). The only person to have experienced the reality of this voyage was, of course, Caillié himself. It is between these two journeys, one real, the other imaginary, that the Atelier Lyrique's new production must pass.
This is precisely what Pierre Barrat's staging - at times sober and clear, at other times dreamlike and teeming - and Bernard Chartreux's text (too dense at times) indicate, throughout the sixteen "stations" of what appears to be a veritable Passion, from René Caillié's childhood to his return to his sister Céleste, via the journey (experienced and re-experienced in the imagination, in memory) to Timbuktu. So much for theater and words.

      Remarkable

Music, on the other hand - a universal language - doesn't face the same problems, and finds it easier to express both clarity and obscurity. In other words, F-B. Mâche's music not only plays an essential role in Temboctou, but even more so, it seems to be the driving force behind the whole, as well as the inseparable link between the dramatic actions, whether dreamt or real. Whether instrumental, sung (solos, ensembles, children's choir) or spoken, it is - even in its silences - the very "breath" of this show.
This is another indication of F-B. Mâche's success, even if the composer never seeks the easy way out, quite the contrary... with a few fresh "breezes", however, such as what is written for the children or the bridge duet. But what beauty there is in these vast ascents of sound (in the boat trip, in particular), of formidable tension, set to throbbing percussion (the only truly African element in the score, remarkably rendered by Alain Chaleard). The musicians, moreover, handled their (oh so complex) task extremely well, with a special mention for the "Loïnhdana" ensemble and trombonists Daniel Bruley and Jean-Pol Marchand.
The performers were also outstanding, with Christian Tréguier (René Caillié) a sovereign, as good a singer as he was an actor of great intensity, Laure Florentin (Céleste) deserving of high praise in both singing and acting, Christian Davesnes with his full voice and strong personality, Esther Lamandier with her bewitching voice and fascinating presence, and Evelyne Razimovsky with her crystal-clear voice. Not forgetting Patrick Minard, Anne-Laure Poulain, Michel Lecoq, Florence Limon and Philippe Devine. And the children and adults (all amateurs) involved in ALR's work. As did Isabel Echarri and Diego Etcheverry (designers of a beautiful set). Annick Minck (musical direction), Gilberte Tsaï (staging), Georges Vanet (lighting), etc., all artisans of a new and beautiful adventure of the Atelier lyrique, an adventure which, let us emphasize, avoids in its rigor any African "folklore" or adulterated tourist imagery.

                 Latest Nouvelles d'Alsace June 18, 1982

Journey to the impossible elsewhere

Among today's French composers, François-Bernard Mâche is one of those most attracted by extra-European music, closer than our own to those natural sounds whose synthesis with the sounds of our musical culture constitutes the most original aspect of his research.
With the choice of a highly original subject, we could have expected a great deal from this new Mâche-Barrat collaboration, following on from Mangeurs d'ombre. Our partial disappointment is due above all to Bernard Chartreux, author of the (too) voluminous Temboctou libretto.
The subject remains fascinating: the tragic destiny of René Caillié, an ex-convict who became one of the pioneers in the exploration of Africa's interior at the dawn of the 19th century, at a time when this continent, apart from its coasts, was still a large white spot on atlases. This enlightened man, full of complexes and eager to surpass himself, had one obsession: to reach Timbuktu, a mythical, forbidden and inaccessible city.
To achieve this, Caillié disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim, and for years shared the incredibly miserable conditions of the African travelers themselves. The stages of his ordeal are all rites of passage, as many self-strippings. And when, at the end of a thousand tribulations, he comes within sight of the fabulous city, it's nothing more than a village shorn of its former splendor. That's where the first half of the show ends, with the sudden collapse of a tension that has gradually become unbearable - and remains so, given the absence of any liberating catharsis.
The story could end there, but the chalice has not yet been drunk to the dregs: there is the ordeal of the long return journey across the Sahara, where the physical and moral destruction of Caillié ends, as the hostile, inviolate Africa rejects him, a barely human wreck, in Tangier. Then there is the supreme mockery of the triumphant welcome given in Paris to a definitive absentee.
René Caillié's Passion offered a librettist a magnificent subject. But Bernard Chartreux ruined it all by falling into the French musical theater plague of excessive literature. Mâche's music, often remarkable, sometimes of exceptional beauty, is literally submerged by a verbal torrent, lacking scenic rhythm and dramatic articulation. Where this logorrhea temporarily calms down, the music can take flight, and these are also the best moments of Pierre Barrat's staging, which constantly tries to save the unsalvageable and sometimes succeeds.
The role of Caillié is played by Christian Tréguier, an emaciated, hallucinated figure with ascetic temples. The vocal cast included Esther Lamandier as Antinéa, the symbol of the inviolable, ever-stealing African woman, and above all the astonishing Evelyne Razimovsky as Passerelle, Chienne and Lilith, as well as Laure Florentin as Céleste, Caillié's antinomic yet complementary sister, riveted to her provincial village.
Mâche's score gives pride of place to voices, soloists and choirs (including a children's choir). The instrumental part makes highly original use of a small ensemble of ancient instruments, the Ensemble Loinhdana, grouping bowed fiddle, oboe, flute, chalemie and percussion. Mâche emphasizes the links between our medieval music and its partly Arabic sources. Two trombones, a clarinet and a guitar complete the modest instrumentation, but an important protagonist of the score is the computer, or more precisely the real-time digital processor, which enables fascinating transmutations of vocal and instrumental sounds. Without doubt, the most original and substantial passages of the score are to be found in the sequences of the journey itself (second half of the first part), with powerful evocations of the African landscape, both its natural sounds (animal, vegetable, atmospheric) and its traditional music, rightly perceived by Mâche as an extension of the previous ones.

                              Harry Halbreich La Croix July 6, 1982

...all these languages are to be judged in the name of theater and the indispensable relationship between the real and the imaginary: onirism and utopia are the mirrors of realism and above all constitute a reading of memory. Otherwise, there's bad theater and orphan music, and they're not about to fall in love.
Mirage, tragedy, melodrama
In its fourteen years of experience, the Festival d'Avignon is well aware of these fundamental facts, and is constantly analyzing them. But it has a hard time convincing creators (composers and playwrights) to be aware of the pitfalls that await them. The concepts of memory and mirrors are precisely at the heart of François-Bernard Mâche's work Temboctou, based on the story of René Caillié, a character torn between the need for an elsewhere and nostalgia for home, a contradiction that can only be resolved through the power of the imagination. Only music can mediate this conflict, reducing the two images of the same dream into a single human image: Saharan mirages are matched by sonic mirages.
                                                             				  Guy Erismann

Like every year, France-Culture plays an active part in the Festival, bringing in its wake a whole stream of programs and shows marked by the greatest novelty. Indeed, if there's one genre that France-Culture passionately defends, it's Musical Theatre. An art form that combines music and theater, and which, unlike opera, is currently attracting the most advanced and freshest creators.
This year, 4 shows will be presented in Avignon, in co-production with France Culture and the Festival. The first, Temboctou, was produced by the Atelier lyrique du Rhin and opens on July 11 at 9.30 pm at the Cloître des Carmes. The music, composed by François-Bernard Mâche, takes us on a journey through an imaginary Africa, based on an account of a 19th-century voyage by a forgotten explorer, René Caillié.
Writer Bernard Chartreux has taken this story and turned it into a theatrical text whose sounds will blend organically with the music, and which will be sung and spoken by 10 actor-singers. Eight musicians will also take to the stage, amidst a children's choir from Colmar schools and a group of amateurs. This is the novelty of the show, which, under the direction of specialists from the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin, has brought a whole host of activities to the city of Colmar. The theme of the show was nomadism, the imaginary voyage of Africa seen from the angle of dreams, and the famous Temboctou around which this exotic and poetic work revolves.
Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï were asked to bring together text, images and music in a meaningful staging. This 19th-century voyage to Timbuktu will undoubtedly join the great myth of contemporary wandering, as experienced by poets such as Rimbaud and Kerouac, as well as a whole younger generation. Here, exoticism meets modernity.

                                         Le Méridional, July 10 1982

Temboctou, the spellbinding magic of a journey to an unknown land...

Temboctou is the first work of musical theater to be presented this summer in Avignon. With music by François-Bernard Mâche and text by Bernard Chartreux, the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin recounts the journey of the first white man to Temboctou. His name was René Caillié.
Leaving, then, is man's eternal whim. Staying, no less eternal a necessity for old men. Caillié, who was truly the first white man to discover the "fabulous" city of Temboctou at the end of the 19th century, becomes the pretext for an original and beautiful work of musical theater.
For once, the genre seems to have been mastered. Pierre Barrat, who directed the show, has succeeded in finding an aesthetically pleasing way out of the current difficulty of reconciling song and theater, word and sound.
Conveying all the poetry of the text to the audience through the music is a gamble that we take every summer in Avignon. Rarely, however, has the marriage been so happy.
This is not to say that everything is perfect.
The spectator may feel slightly frustrated by the impression of "losing the thread" of a story that is rich in poetic imagery.
But the essential is there. Thanks to the singer-actors, thanks to the musicians who play tunes inspired by African or Arabic melodies on stage, thanks to the chorus, thanks to the sets and costumes, whose sumptuous simplicity fills the stage with distant imaginary worlds.
For two and a half hours, we follow this dreamlike itinerary, more psychological than geographical, more poetic than realistic, and experience the spellbinding magic of this happy marriage of sound, song, gesture and image.
Temboctou: a "voyage en chambre" show that makes you want to meditate on the deeper reasons behind our desire to travel. Caillié, who builds his entire adventure on an imaginary vision of a fantastic Temboctou, will be disappointed to find that it's nothing more than a village of shabby huts. Isn't that what awaits us all, when we think we'll find elsewhere what we don't have here?

                        Luc Henri Fage Vaucluse Matin July 13 1982

Musical theater at the Cloïtre des Carmes: "Temboctou". Music resists travel.

"Temboctou" is the first Théâtre Musical work to be performed this summer, produced jointly by France-Culture, the Avignon Festival and the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin. It has the merit of bringing together professionals and amateurs alike, and of remaining enthusiastic throughout.
In truth, "Temboctou" takes up an idea as young as the world, that of the journey to a foreign land, where the vicissitudes of the quest mingle with the dazzle of new sensations. The real hero of this journey, a certain René Caillié, the son of a convict who lived in the 19th century, follows in the footsteps of such great wandering poets as Rimbaud, Kerouac and, closer to home, Kenneth White. It is along these difficult lines that the author of the text, Bernard Chartreux, the directors Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, and the composer of the music, François-Bernard Mâche, have conceived their show. A line that links life and poetry, the journey and the inner quest, the real and the imaginary. But for some reason, the show, as presented to us on Sunday at the Cloître des Carmes, doesn't reach these dimensions. 
It does show us a hero struggling with his dreams and the difficulties of the African road. The show also skilfully blends exotic scenes with interior scenes featuring members of the Caillié family who have remained in France. However, even with this comparison, the journey fails to engage us. The image of Africa we are presented with is no more than a postcard mirage.
The show's colors are merely illustrative, verging on the naive. The only thing that stands out is the music. Starting from every corner of the stage, and composed of sound effects, psalmodies and recitations, it composes an extremely rich and diverse sound paste for the ear. Children's choirs take part. The song of insects, the melodies of voices...resonate in the evening like a call. This is undoubtedly the real journey.
        
A.D., "Vaucluse-Avignons-Actualités" newspaper column July 13, 1982

Two dreams confronted

Musical theater is evolving more and more towards a kind of symbolic language. In the staging, it juxtaposes visual "signs" that put us on the track of concrete action, but distorted according to the particular sensibility of the drama's heroes. In the music, he contrasts rhapsody - essential for prolonging the local color already asserted by the set - with a symphony of harmonies, timbres and rhythms in which we must recognize the dissonances, anxieties and emotions of the characters embarking on the adventure. The eye and ear, if they manage to adapt to this obligatory dichotomy, simultaneously perceive concrete impressions and abstract information, sometimes complementary, often contradictory. But life is generally rich in such complications.
Musician François-Bernard Mâche had the good idea of choosing as the theme of his libretto the voyage to Timbuktu of amateur explorer René Caillié, who in the 19th century was the first European to discover the black, Muslim city of Sudan. He set off like one drifting towards a mirage, a certain Antinea. He discovered a civilization. But he received this civilization as if it were his own, sometimes seeing the right thing because he was liberal and eager to understand, sometimes retreating into his European heritage because he was afraid, because he was sick and losing his ability to welcome.
And all this can be heard in Mâche's music, which blends tam-tams from elsewhere with the rustle of electronic music. Thunder and rain become melody, and the rhythms of unknown languages give birth to sounds that breathe meaning into them. I'm not going to tell you that the approach to such a work is simple. In fact, a fascinating evening can be spent contenting oneself with what one sees, and neglecting the sensitive, psychological counterpoint woven into the score.
But if you take the trouble to get to the heart of the system, you'll be able to forgive some of the length, which, it seems to me, is easy to erase. The result is a work that confronts the sensibilities of two cultures, two worlds, two dreams, with a hyper-professionalism of stagecraft and psychology.
Experimental theater, perhaps, but already largely operational.

                         Claude Baignères Figaro July 13, 1982

The performance machine. After Mnouchkine in the Cour d'Honneur, "Temboctou" at Les Carmes
African fantasy, from dream to reality
Africa in the early 19th century was a dark enigma to be tamed. René Caillié, a poor, self-taught young peasant, disguised as an Arab, crosses the desert to reach Timbuktu, the city of mirages. This feverish dreamer, who paved the way for the expeditionary corps, recorded the story of his journey in a book. Maspéro has just republished it (collection "La Découverte"). The last century is a mine, barely disused today. And yet... Only one hundred years separate Gide's "Voyage à Tombouctou" (Journey to Timbuktu) from Leiris's "L'Afrique fantôme" (Phantom Africa), to say nothing of the pages in which Céline vomits Africa. But what didn't he vomit?
Before the rape
Rightly fascinated, Chartreux sees in Caillié a brother of Rimbaud, fleeing to Harrar. Caillié's language, in the raw ingenuity of a thirsty quest, thus catalogues the harsh desire of the myth preceding colonial rape. Chartreux sees a "passion" in the odyssey of the man who, blinded by the mirage, discovers in the end that he is nothing but sand, and returns to his homeland to die...
François-Bernard Mâche grafts a skilfully structured score onto this stimulating project, blending recorded "natural" sounds with a written instrumental and vocal part (marrying the "nobility" of the trombone with the roughness of the double bass...).
The length of the Carmes cloister is taken up, with the audience on either side. We quickly realize that the blurring of codes that we've come to expect in "musical theater" - a genre with ill-defined, yet open-ended contours - only works in fits and starts. We sense the flaying of intention. It is not validated on stage. We hear a text, we listen to music. Most of the time, it's just a juxtaposition. At best, the dialectic is timid. A certain bric-a-brac obliterates the space (mannequins, deckchairs and Louis XV armchairs...). The actor-singer-musicians seem hampered. As Bedouins, they are unbelievable. The division of labor doesn't just fade away in wishful thinking. Christian Tréguier (René Caillié), however, is firm in his enlightenment. Evelyne Razimovsky (La Chienne, then Lilith) finely theatricalizes her vocal score. A superb "negro" mourning chorus closes the first part.
But it falls short of expectations. The device is too clumsy for the fluidity of the mirage. The virtues of the text (novelistic in the best sense of the word, with a slightly dry lyricism); Mâche's music, with its assertive, thoughtful concreteness; Annick Minck's clear direction, and the goodwill of all, do not prevent the object from remaining diligent.

                                          Jean-Pierre Léonardini L'Humanité July 13, 1982

If you've been to Temboctou...
Musical theater exists. Every summer, it takes place in a cloister in Avignon. Pierre Barrat, Gilberte Tsaï, François-Bernard Mâche and Bernard Chartreux have joined forces to offer a pleasant African evening.

Rochefort-sur-Mer, its narrow streets, convicts and naval officers, and Timbuktu, the mysterious, the inviolate: these are the two poles of the show by composer François-Bernard Mâche, writer Bernhard Chartreux and director Pierre Barrat (collaborating for the occasion with Gilberte Tsaï), which opened Avignon's musical theater at the Cloître des Carmes. Now in its fourteenth year, this is a classic collaboration between the festival and France-Culture. After all, it was inaugurated in 1969 at certain Orden, foreshadowing the bitter debates that would later pit enemies and supporters of "musical theater" against each other as an indispensable means of expression.
Today, the question is as topical as ever. Thanks to Marie-Noël Rio and Michel Rostain's highly personal analysis of the subject, recently published by Recherches in L'Opéra mort ou vif. And, above all, thanks to a program that moves between the venerable Théâtre Municipal and its heat-insulating velvet seats, the Célestins cloister and the Condition des Soies. Between now and August 6, you'll be able to discover three other works from this genre so difficult to define: Winnie, by the unsurpassable tandem of Pier'Alli and Sylvano Bussotti, Bernard Cavanna's Ion (after Euripides) and Récitations, the last of Georges Aperghis' many children.
But, as things are moving along, the area around the Palais des Papes will soon be as torrid as the lands once visited by Charles de Foucault, so let's get back to Temboctou. And not Timbuktu, to respect the spelling chosen by the authors and René Caillié, the young self-taught peasant from the Poitevin marshes whose story they have decided to tell us. In 1827, three years before the Algerian expedition decreed by Louis-Philippe, Rimbaud's immediate ancestor set out to discover this mythical city. After battling desert, scurvy and all manner of ills, he finally discovered it and wrote his famous Voyage à Temboctou. But he soon found it insignificant. Hence his return to France and the dreary hours he spent with his sister Céleste, a limping, Balzacian countrywoman consumed by a terrible sense of possession and incestuous tendencies.
The meaning of this lamentable Odyssey, recounted by Bernard Chartreux, the author of Palais de Justice, and his team-mates, is translucent: it speaks to our periodic taste for the roadless. And our disappointment once we've reached our goal, because, except perhaps in China, the imaginary is always far more powerful than strict reality. Didn't the "backpackers" and other hippies of the sixties have to experience this on the roads, so often sublimated, of Kathmandu and elsewhere?
This painful dichotomy, skilfully underscored by Pierre Barrat's polished staging and a pleasing set design by Isabel Echarri and Diego Etcheverry (the set designers of Carmen in...Peking), also brings with it concerns which, though secondary, are no less interesting. These include endemic, pretentious colonialism, which will inevitably lead to the loss of Indochina and Algeria, a disgusting superiority complex expressed in the so-called "civilized" object that is René Caillié's umbrella-refuge, and an underlying nostalgia for the 19th century. The latter is currently very much in vogue, as it was already present in a certain Liebestod presented at the last Biennale de Nanterre.
With Temboctou, François-Bernard Mâche has renewed ties with Avignon, forged in 1976 and 1979 with Da Capo and Mangeurs d'ombre. His participation, which is very much musical theater in the original sense of the term, in that it illustrates a range of very different dramatic situations, is a kind of portrait of the interests that have always attracted him. The linguist and semiologist shines through in Etruscan phrases, the chants of the natives observing René Caillié and the onomatopoeia uttered by the bourgeois dear to Guizot.
Various incantations, vocal rites and rhythms drummed by members of the Loïndhana group, an ensemble of medievalist musicians who also play the fiddle, denote the humanities specialist. As for the storm and the noises coming from a magnetic tape, the conversations and melodies transiting through a computer in real time, they evoke François-Bernard Mâche's fruitful collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer. Performed by a team of singers led by the redheaded Annick Minck, and including Christian Tréguier, Michel Lecoq, Patrick Minard and Philippe Devine, they often converge on nostalgia for elsewhere. A concept embodied by the beautiful Esther Lamandier, who has temporarily left early music to become the character of Antinéa, a mirage of exotic vocalizations...

                             Philippe Olivier Libération July 14, 1982

"Temboctou" by François-Bernard Mâche. Dazzling music, finely tuned staging and a dream of Africa.

If musical theater is a contested genre, if sometimes its existence is even doubted, Temboctou, the France-Culture and Festival d'Avignon production, has just brilliantly demonstrated the contrary. This musical success, this realistic yet symbolic staging, and the charm of this show are due to a close-knit team: François-Bernard Mâche, for the music, Pierre Barrat for the staging, assisted by Gilberte Tsaï, on a limpid and beautiful text by Bernard Chartreux, based on the stories of René Caillié.
Temboctou, the real name of Timbuktu: in the heyday of nascent colonialism, early in the 19th century, a little peasant boy named René Caillié dreams in class. He dreams of geography. He dreams of geography. He dreams of a city of water, home to an unattainable woman, Antinéa. A young blond boy sings Antinéa's song in a nursery rhyme voice, in the naivety of an Epinal image.
The Epinal image persists. As an adult, René Caillié is fascinated by Africa. He leaves. On stage, the Balsatian pomp of the French Provençal bourgeoisie is replaced by caravans, turbans, water carriers, bales of grain and junk: a voyage.
Voyage", wrote Lévi-Strauss at the start of Tristes tropiques, "what you send back to us is our own garbage thrown in the face of humanity. René Caillié will go as far as Timbuktu, meeting fat, beautiful women who tirelessly eat rice, meeting scouts, or entire tribes. In Timbuktu, there's nothing. A woman perhaps, the eternal Eve, with a vulture's eye fixed on her head or elsewhere. The traveler's corpse will return home alive: but a corpse, in other words, emptied of its substance by the journey itself.
Such is the plot. François-Bernard Mâche's music follows from voice to voice, from chorus to chorus, the passage from bourgeois France to the deep sounds of Africa.
Water drums, improvised balafons, rattles, percussion and women's voices make for a dream of Africa: not quite real, yet it feels like it. It's the kind of Africa that teenagers in crisis dream of as they try to become adults. Rimbaud in utopia to grow, grow and find who knows what. Mâche's marvellous music sings of this illness. It's this imagery that Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï's perfectly poised staging describes: realism, yes, there really are bales, turbans, water, dunes, nothing to catch the eye and leave it unused. Pierre Barrat's vision is sometimes almost too much. As for Caillié, the hieratic Christian Tréguier, he oscillates between his African quest and the puppet that represents it, he the victor of Timbuktu - long live France - he the corpse.
Voyage, what you send back to us is our own garbage... You have to travel with Caillié: the despair is sublime and has the beauty of a fantasy that empties itself.

The "French infernal machine". To obtain the effects of reverberated voices that come from everywhere and nowhere, provoking African strangeness, François-Bernard Mâche used a brand-new instrument that, for once, is not Japanese but French. The DHM Publison is a real-time digital processor that transforms sound into numbers, which are then processed by computer and transformed back into sounds from elsewhere. All this sound alchemy takes place in 1/10000 of a second, and can only be perceived as instantaneous. The sung sound can also be transposed over several octaves, inverted, treated as an echo, and even transformed from spoken to sung.
This is the first time that this magical device, previously used mainly in variety shows under the name of "French infernal machine", has been used for a contemporary musical creation.

                     Catherine Clément Le matin de Paris July 14 1982

Timbuktu. Memory and imagination for structured musical theater

A journey to the end of the desert, to the last moving frontiers of the imaginary, but with rapid returns to reality, such was the itinerary of René Caillié, an explorer attracted and fascinated by the mythical Timbuktu. The show, directed by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, is based on a text by Bernard Chartreux, whose vigorous language is full of colorful, poetic images. It is divided into two main moments, with the space encompassing internal sequences chained together or extended by musical episodes (instrumental or purely vocal). Temboctou", the first music-theater show at Festival 82 and co-produced by Atelier Lyrique du Rhin, successfully combines stagecraft, gesture and voice. The live work on spoken and sung language adds an extra, almost timeless dimension to the pure recitative.
The alternation between imagined time, recreated time and real, immediate time is one of the seductions of this "opera", rich in events, simultaneous actions that are still very "legible", group movements in which the actor-singers are both actors and spectators. François-Bernard Mâche's music is very present, both in its rigorously elaborated passages (with slight electroacoustic manipulations or on instruments from popular traditions or not), and in those left to a kind of free improvisation: actors, singers and musicians are all effective, contributing to a show that - from the very first performance - is clearly defined and complete. In all the manifestations used, from the simplest to the most refined (especially on a local level), the sound material used remains, it seems to me, the supporting element, the backbone of this fresco, of this initiatory journey.

                           Nicole Salabert La Marseillaise July 15, 1982

Musical theater: enchantment in song
Every year, Avignon provides an opportunity for musical theater to assert itself. Pierre Barrat, director of the Atelier lyrique du Rhin, tells us about "Temboctou", which he directs with Gilberte Tsaï.

For many years now, Pierre Barrat has been interested in this particular form that links theater and music, without ever uttering the word opera. He founded the Théâtre musical d'Angers and devoted himself to the search for a new lyrical repertoire. For eight years now, he has been pursuing the same type of work with the Atelier lyrique du Rhin.
"Today, I prefer to speak of musical theatrical research. Our task is clear: we must enable composers and authors who want to work together to do so, and we must also enable singers and actors to take part in this research. The show he is currently presenting, Temboctou, is the result of an exemplary collaboration, based on a theme that interested him and which he sums up in these two words: "Rester, partir".
"First of all, we look for subjects likely to interest our audience, ideas and facts that concern them. And around the nomad/sedentary couple, around the story of those who leave and those who stay, many common or solitary adventures can be grafted."
Bernard Chartreux, dramaturge at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg (we salute the regional character of this work), wrote the text for Temboctou based on the extraordinary life of René Caillié, who discovered the mythical city on his own. A poor, rather shy young man, with no means, no friends, no support, he left everything behind one day and set off. Let's go! His story inspires, seduces and fascinates...
What was he thinking, one morning in 1827, to abandon his native Poitou and his sister Céleste, the one who limped, the one who stayed, while he went deep into Africa? Read the book he wrote on his return, "Le Voyage à Tombouctou", which François Maspéro recently republished. Leaving, leaving everything, coming back... We think of Rimbaud exiled in Harrar, and Céleste is a bit like Isabelle. Bernard Chartreux has turned this fabulous, dreamlike story about Africa as a mystery and our inner abysses into a tale of passion, taken up musically by François-Bernard Mâche, who says that "music and theater remain two of the rare places open to the nomadism of the imaginary".
François-Bernard Mâche's musical rendering of the real and imaginary spaces traversed by Caillié, his passage from phantom Africa to the fantasies of Africa, and the double that always haunted the explorer and adventurer, uses a computer to manipulate the sounds and introduce a light, a break, a fault. His musical inventions are not gadgets, but the result of a difficult search that is absolutely in tune with our times, our reality.
"We need to find an epochal form, a form that corresponds to us. We need new aesthetics. Today, of course, opera is back in vogue. But when we began our research, a whole generation of musicians were completely unaware of the genre." For this show, singers and actors are mixed together, and Pierre Barrat is particularly satisfied with the homogeneity of their work. The ideal, for him, would be to have a permanent troupe, which would allow everyone to reach their full potential. "Of course, there are a certain number of singers with whom I work more frequently. But this excludes them from the traditional circuits, and, for them, it's difficult."
The sixteen-strong choir is an amateur choir that has been working all year, but not just on Temboctou.
"Our mission is also one of animation, and we have organized an exhibition on the theme of "Rester-partir", in parallel with the production of the show, in collaboration with the visual artists, and in particular with those taking part in the show, architects and sociologists. For us, it's another way of making our work understood, and that remains the most important thing."

                        Armelle Héliot Le quotidien de Paris July 15, 1982

From "Temboctou" to "Romance of Mexico

Musical theater was undoubtedly launched by France Culture at Avignon, where it initially played an experimental role. It has now reached maturity, as witnessed by Temboctou, in which musician F.B.Mâche and writer Bernard Chartreux join forces. Here, the music doesn't obscure the text, but rather makes it heard. Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï's highly successful staging in the Carmes cloister sets the adventure of René Caillié, the explorer, in its intimate contradictions.
Like his soul, the playground is divided between the narrow sedentary life of his native village and the wanderings of nomads, the dream of Timbuktu and the reality of a destroyed city, the mythology of a hero and his own confusion. The journey becomes a kind of initiatory ordeal in which traditional Islamic music merges with the subtle suggestions of Mâche's sonorities...
                                                       
                                J.-J.Lerrant Le Progrès July 16, 1982

"Temboctou" at the Carmes cloister
The power of the imaginary

Who is René Caillié? An explorer, an ethnologist, a poor soul, a madman, a poet, a mystifier? Perhaps all of the above. In any case, Bernard Chartreux of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg and composer François-Bernard Mâche attempt to capture his inner adventure in an ambitious work of musical theater, premiered by the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin and France-Culture at the Avignon Festival.
Temboctou illustrates the power of the imagination over man: the geography lessons of his childhood fascinated a poor young man, the son of a convict, fixing him on the all-white "terrae incognitae" of central Africa, and the name of a fabulous city, Timbuktu, for which the author prefers the spelling Temboctou. In 1827, disguised as an Egyptian merchant, he set off to Timbuktu to assert himself, perhaps even to exist, through terrible adventures, writing down his travel impressions for a geography society, and returning after a dreadful desert crossing, broken, destroyed, half-mad and unconscious. A fabulous and miserable adventure in which the imaginary, now real, ended up devouring the man entirely. In the words of Bernard Chartreux, "to give an account of Caillié's journey to Timbuktu is to write a Passion".
Based on the explorer's own texts, the show evokes "initiation, trial, futile assumption, expiation" in an often fragmented lyrical form, mixing characters and times at different levels, in a rather confused way, where superb flights of fancy alternate with haunting repetitions and episodes bordering on the absurd. Bernard Chartreux has undoubtedly allowed himself to be taken too much by the idea that Caillié was a sort of Rimbaud "who only knew how to live and die his Illuminations and his Saison en enfer", and inflicts on us, notably in the scurvy scene, a verbal delirium of the worst literature.
But the show directed by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï retains an undeniable power, embodied above all by Christian Tréguier, a René Caillié hallucinated and hallucinating in inner truth, and a large cast (under the musical direction of Annick Minck), who bring to life these ghosts of Tuaregs and mythical Blacks, in particular Esther Lamandier, whose guttural voice, full of mysterious reflections, symbolizes the mythical Antinea, the female face of this Africa that obsesses the traveler.
The music of François-Bernard Mâche, whose research has often tended towards a "confrontation between nature and culture", is, one might say, an imaginary ethnomusicology like the ethnography of Caillié himself: Africa seen through the fantasies of the European. But he has created beautiful sonic atmospheres and moments of great lyricism, with simple means, haunting drumming, percussion on various materials, ancient instruments with strange sounds and trombones with long, mysterious, initiatory cries. The use of a computer, a real-time digital processor, enables curious echo effects, multiplication and drifting of sounds, but also of speech, contributing to the splitting of personalities in different times (before, during and after the action).
The melodies of l'Afrique imaginaire are often quite beautiful, even if sometimes excessively sought-after, but the composer has failed to make the dramatic characters sing in false or banal recitatives devoid of lyricism. And yet, through the trial and error, outrageousness and naivety of this show, a breath of fresh air passes and a face is revealed: that of a grandiose and derisory man who well deserved to be known.

                       Jacques Longchampt Le Monde July 17, 1982

What makes us sedentary? What is it that, from time to time, puts us travelers at risk on the roads that lie beyond our reach ? What drives us on these roads to the other side of the world, and what are we looking for?
At the dawn of the 19th century, René Caillié became an explorer, fascinated by Africa and, more specifically, the famous Temboctou to which countless golden legends are attached. To do so, he suffered the rigors of the penal colony and, with his bare feet, wrote a kind of Passion. To accomplish his journey, he chose to go forward masked. His enterprise is based on lies, risks and punishment.
As for the music, better than ever, it recounts not only René Caillié's journey, but that of his imagination. "As composer Fr.B.Mâche explains, "Today, when we see the field of travel shrinking to the dimensions of a skull, it is music and theater that remain one of the few places open to the nomadism of the imagination.
This unreal space is rendered through the use of a computer, a real-time digital processor, employed for the first time in a performance. The manipulation of sound, as it occurs, creates an echo system that allows voices and instruments to "nomadize outside their natural limits", as the musician puts it. The text, designed to elicit song, sometimes calls on very special techniques and the use of Etruscan, yodelling and dead languages. The echo is also reflected in the quality of the instrumental sound, which relies heavily on rare instruments from the Middle Ages.

(Xavier Lacavalerie ?) Télérama n°1696, program of July 21 1982 on France-Culture

Impressions d'Afrique

Co-produced by the Atelier lyrique du Rhin, the Festival d'Avignon and France-Culture, François-Bernard Mâche's latest work opened the new series of musical theater that Avignon has been hosting for many years...
Judging by the debate that followed one of the performances, Temboctou, based on a text by Bernard Chartreux and directed by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, is far from unanimously acclaimed. But this debate has no end, and no real means. Intellectual, that is.
At the dawn of the 19th century, when the map of Africa was still full of "terrae incognitae", René Caillié dreamed of Timbuktu. He set off, and his journey slowly turned into a way of the cross. All the more so as his entire project was based on a lie: making people believe he was a Muslim.
Needless to say, the actors have drawn many parallels from Caillié's travels (reprinted by Maspero): Rimbaud, Kerouac, the double, the creator's lie... Barrat, with his usual finesse and conviction, uses the usual symbols: puppets representing the double, models of oriental buildings representing the "desire for Africa"...
Despite the overpowering text and crudely contrived staging, Mâche's music sometimes manages to plunge the listener into that bizarre state we used to call melancholy. Images of African music, simulacrum of percussion, dreams of incantation. The failure of Caillié's experiment lies entirely in the distance Mâche manages to establish between the idea of sonorous Africa and the everyday reality of Caillié singing and listening. Sickness, pain and death, his highs of solitude, populate, embrace and gnaw at him. The mythical Timbuktu is but a muddy village. Voices come unstuck, sounds fall apart, images explode. The dream ends in death, in silence and dryness. It's not Rimbaud, it's Charles de Foucauld.
 
               Jacques Drillon Nouvel Observateur July 31-August 6, 1982

Avignon: Short-breathed breaths
...three shows, crammed to the gills with scenic and musical finds, that succeeded only in distilling boredom.
Take, for example, François-Bernard Mâche's Temboctou, based on a text by Bernard Chartreux, freely adapted from Voyage à Tombouctou, written by explorer René Caillié during his trip to Africa. The libretto is sumptuous, at times recalling Rimbaldian flights of fancy or the violent images of Jacques Vaché.
The music, for all its modernism (real-time synthesis of voices) and clever effects (unusual marriage of certain timbres, suggestive use of percussion), carries the heavy scent of spices and the odors of African earth and rain. In short, for the spectator who's always ready to marvel, it's magic. A change of scenery. A party. All the more so since the staging, by Pierre Barrat and Gilberte Tsaï, and the performers and singers admirably serve this crazy story of desire, travel and mirages.
But then disaster strikes: a long "tunnel" screamed rather than shouted by the main protagonist, who is plagued by illness and hallucinations; a completely useless second half, during which the action gets bogged down and the music wears itself out in incessant repetition. The whole thing just falls flat on its face. At three-quarters of an hour, we had a little masterpiece. But it's a long time, three-quarters of an hour of big talk.

                       Xavier Lacavalerie Télérama August 14-20, 1982

Explorer René Caillié decides to travel to the heart of Africa, to the forbidden city of Timbuktu. He joins a caravan, borrowing the clothes and identity of a Muslim merchant...From this (true) story in the form of an initiatory journey, Bernard Chartreux has drawn material for a concise and highly effective text, set to music by François-Bernard Mâche, which premiered at the Avignon Festival in the early 80s. Here is a new production of this opera, with staging and sets by Christian Chérézy, under the direction of Jean-Marie Adrien. All the spells of Africa are yours...

                 X.L. (Xavier Lacavalerie) Télérama n°2352, February 1995

Contemporary music. This composer finds his sound models as much in languages as in nature. "Temboctou, recreated this weekend, reflects his style.

Mâche, themes and "Temboctou
François-Bernard Mâche is a cultivated musician. In other words, he likes to connect things that might seem far apart. In 1958, at the age of 23, he joined Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de recherches musicales, while still a student at the Ecole normale de la rue d'Ulm. With a degree in Greek archaeology, this associate of arts is no stranger to cutting-edge technologies. His works, his style and even his working methods also aim to reconcile seemingly opposing elements: the Ancient (not to say the Antique) and the Modern, the East and the West, the distant and the near.
Today, François-Bernard Mâche's catalog includes some sixty works. Khnoum, Planh, Kassandra, Styx: the titles of these works speak volumes about the universe the musician has constructed. They betray a great love of Greek mythology and of the world's languages. In the latter field, he has a soft spot for languages that are about to disappear, and for those whose sounds we know but not their meaning. Emblematic of his relationship with the languages that provide models for his compositions - his Trois chants sacrés for solo voice call on Hittite, Etruscan and Gallic. The work is unsettling in its simple beauty, and in the abolition of time it establishes.
For François-Bernard Mâche, nature is also a great provider of sound models. In Korwar, one of his main works, the harpsichord plays with the croaking of frogs, the cries of birds and those of a boar in rut, as recorded, crudely, by the composer. The dialogue proceeds by imitation, until it is difficult to distinguish the partners. Here, too, the listener is left in a state of confusion: the marriage between nature and culture, country and city, dirty and clean, is born of the osmosis between the boar and the harpsichord, the aristocratic instrument par excellence. A far cry from Messiaen-style ornithology.
Revived and recreated at the Opéra-théâtre de Massy this weekend, Temboctou is a musical show that reveals many of the characteristic features of François-Bernard Mâche's style. The work tells the story of René Caillié, the explorer who discovered the city of Timbuktu in 1827 - which he called Temboctou. The opposition of cultures, the man torn between Europe and Africa, between sedentary life and nomadism, between reality and mirages: these are all coupled notions found in Bernard Chartreux's text, set to music by the composer. The choice of instruments - ancient, medieval and non-European on the one hand, electronic lutherie on the other - is a sonic extension of this.
Director Christian Cheyrezy asked the composer to remount Temboctou, first performed in 1982 at the Festival d'Avignon. Obviously, he had to make a few major changes.
For all that, the composer remains faithful to his conception of musical theater - the ideal place, according to him, for the staging of music. Opera did not appeal to him, because of its nostalgic connotations. Above all, at a time when composers are returning en masse to the operatic genre, he feels that the price to pay is too heavy and the constraints too great.

	Dominique Druhen, Libération February 11-12, 1995

"Temboctou": this is how the African trading post was first spelled by the man who discovered it in 1827. René Caillié and his "non-epopee", a fake scholar dressed up as an Egyptian Muslim merchant to cross the Sahara, inspired playwright Bernard Chartreux and composer François-Bernard Mâche to write a very curious "non-opera". Composed in 1982, it was revived for two performances by the Opéra-théâtre de Massy as part of the first Festival des arts d'aujourd'hui.
François-Bernard Mâche is one of those composers for whom the spoken word and the sounds of nature constitute the first states of a music that is nonetheless highly written, but which never really departs from those elemental germs that are the shimmer of rain, the rumor of wind and sea. The words themselves are musical, moving insensitively into song. The story of René Caillié's voyage gives rise on many occasions to these puffs of sound, sometimes moving towards the descriptive and figurative, sometimes towards pure music and abstract rhythms: the shriek of wooden chopsticks with African connotations, a threne intoned from the back of the throat in Tibetan style, an ageless melody for the role of the immortal Antinéa.
Occasionally, a computer takes over the spoken word and, through its transformations, invents an inhuman, perhaps animal language. Mâche, who is often classed as an ecological composer, fears neither sophistication nor computers.

                              Anne Rey, Le Monde, February 15, 1995