Tonight, let's go to the opera. 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.
It's midnight. I'm just back
from a dress rehearsal of Samson and
Delilah at the Houston Grand Opera. Dress
rehearsals are much like regular performances. But
you can still see the makings of the opera. Tonight
a small army on the main floor is armed with lap
boards, soft reading lamps, TV screens, and
cameras. Tonight I might've stumbled into NASA
mission control.
Young women with head mikes and clipboards move
about, softly cuing and correcting what they see. A
huge communications web is still visible. It won't
be tomorrow. Delilah's makeup was harsh and pasty
in her first scene. Now, they've put it right. She
looks lovely. A great beehive of cooperative
technology whispers under the pianissimos.
We're in a box seat. One of the skirts behind the
proscenium is gaping. It'll be closed tomorrow
night. But now I make out singers in the darkness.
They pace in brown concentration -- relaxing,
focusing, running lines in their heads.
Then it hits me. In all my life as an engineer,
this is the most technically dense world I've ever
known. The musical instruments took thousands of
years to evolve. Each violin, each flute, is a
memorial to untold human ingenuity. The musical
scores could only be written after musical notation
evolved for 800 years. The music itself is much
more than Saint-Saens's brilliance. It also
reflects Darwinian selection among tonal systems
and rhythmic schemes.
Opera has shaped vocal technique, set design, and
theatrical devices for 350 years. Mathematical
acoustics had to evolve for 150 years before it
could produce this hall. The communications web is
made from state-of-the-art electronics. Over 200
athletes and high-level technicians work below. An
NBA game, or a shuttle launch, seems simple by
comparison.
Now a smoldering Delilah sings to Samson: "My
beauty is in vain." Of course it isn't in vain at
all. Samson doesn't have a chance. He's transfixed
by her guile. And we are transfixed by the guile,
and the passion, of 200 people working in
millisecond precision to tell us how her treachery
took Samson down.
Tomorrow, the house will be full. Gone will be the
shadowy directors and prompters. Gone the gap
behind the proscenium. The audience will be carried
up, right into the wild, doomed Temple of Dagon.
Tomorrow, only Samson's pain and his dying triumph
will remain visible. But by the third act last
night I, too, had suspended my disbelief. By the
third act I'd entirely forgotten that all this
magic is man-made.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
