Compañía Nacional de Danza

The ballet ‘La Sílfide’ and its role in history

Like any artistic product inserted in the History of Art, a ballet is not only important for its particular qualities but also for the place it occupies in the evolution of the genre. Thus, the work “La Sylphide” [La Sylphide] is at the core of the Romantic apogee, and is its consequential axis; it can be understood as one of its first crystallized products in style, plot and artistic whole. As the master and great defender of the Bournonvillian repertoire Hans Brenna asserted, all the ballets that followed are to some extent “La Sílfide”. Brenna, in expressing this sentence was well aware that, when Bournonville assembles his version in Copenhagen in 1836, more than 15 years ago that ballets were being premiered all over Europe based, in a common way, on “Trilby ou le Lutin d’Argail”, by Charles Nodier, published in 1822, a somewhat gothic little book that also harbored reminiscences of the great Elizabethan theater and where the legends of the Scottish Highlands come to life.

As history gives us picturesque surprises, one of them is in the Spanish ballet and “La Sílfide”, called at the time of its premiere in Madrid (1842) sometimes “La Sílfida” and others, “La Sylphide”, where we had the fascinating and peculiar circumstance of alternating the same title in two Madrid theaters (Del Príncipe and Del Circo) on the same days, in two similar but distant versions and with a bitter rivalry full of balletomaniac spies, paid claques, resale, intentional libels and mendacious journalists (nothing new in the intriguing world of the ballet of all life).

Bournonville, who had seen the work in Paris 4 years earlier, bought that day a booklet with Nourrit’s libretto, which he used without modification with the result of two works with identical dramaturgy and which coexisted in many of the European billboards; his original idea of using the Paris music was cut short by the demand for exorbitant royalties. The Paris “La Sylphide” did not survive, and thus the Danish one stands as the oldest ballet preserved with the greatest choreographic fidelity in the international active repertoire.

Bournonville, with the help of local painters Arnold Wallich and Christian F. Christensen, reproduced in detail the original Parisian designs of Pierre Ciceri (scenery) and Eugène Lami (costumes) at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, where the play between the tragic and the gently loving lives on and beats with an always dramatic result: if Romanticism itself is anything, it is precisely that aftertaste where bitterness and beauty combine. The soul of a ballet is what it wants to tell us, beyond steps, phrases, plastic forms; “La Sylphide” says it: even the most impossible love can be imagined and fought for; let’s not forget that Marius Petipa made his own complete adaptation of “La Sylphide” in 1892!

The dynastic and genealogical line chosen by Joaquin de Luz to raise “La Sylphide” is the optimal, if not the best of those available today, to continue to keep alive the basic rigors of this ballet both in terms of style and faithful choreographic reading.

Roger Salas