Today, a ballet gives us an odd window into
history. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
I went to see the French
ballet La Sylphide the other night. It is a
tragedy that calls forth few tears. A Scottish
farmer falls in love with a magical sylph
and leaves his bride-to-be for her. He also offends
the witch who predicted his defection. She avenges
herself by killing him and the sylph as well.
However, as writer Margaret Putnam tells about the
background of La Sylphide, the ballet takes
on complex coloration. It was first performed in
1832. By then, the social reform that'd brought in
the Industrial Revolution was devolving into soot
and squalor. Twenty years earlier, Luddites had struck the new
textile factories. Then the Romantic poets had
begun writing about Satanic
mills and the loss of nature in a world being
built upon coal and steel.
The ballet was part-and-parcel of the
back-to-nature movement. The setting imagines a
world in the Scottish highlands where fairy
creatures live. However, the sylph itself is not
exactly the stuff of fairy tales. It is instead a
creature of alchemy. The
alchemist Paracelsus
imagined that a creature called an "elemental"
lived in each of the old Aristotelian essences,
earth, air, fire, and water. Nymphs were
water creatures, gnomes were of the earth,
and salamanders dwelt in fire.
But the highest creature was the sylph, the winged
elemental who lived in the air. And we suddenly
find ourselves in a spider's web of changing ideas.
For one thing, 250 years of empirical science and
rationalism had replaced Paracelsus' alchemy. By
1832, the Romantics were saying it was time to
rediscover the mind's alchemy. So our tragic
heroine is a winged sylph, a Paracelsan elemental
doomed to die in the aggressive world of humans
around her.
But the renaissance world that was taking shape
around Paracelsus had revived the male-dominated culture of ancient
Greece. As the nineteenth century reacted against
this neo-Grecian rationalism, women began
reclaiming their role. Ballet, for example, had
been centered on male athleticism. The first La
Sylphide choreographer, Filippo Taglioni, cast
his remarkable daughter Maria as the sylph. Maria
Taglioni was a superb dancer. In one stroke, she
redefined ballet, and she ushered in the age of the
prima ballerina.
So a fantasy about simple life in the Scottish
highlands spins out against a rapidly mutating
world. Never mind that the English had just
finished shipping the population of northern
Scotland off to Canada and replaced them with a
lucrative sheep-raising industry. This is the
imaginary Scotland of Walter Scott or
Brigadoon.
At length, our star-crossed sylph is wrapped in the
wicked witch's poisoned shawl. Her tiny wings fall
to the floor like fish scales, and the old alchemy
is pronounced dead. Yet the sylph died at the very
moment when people like Faraday, Darwin, and
Maxwell were about to rebuild European science. And
they did so by calling up a renewed alchemy of
human thinking.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
