Christmas without The Nutcracker is almost like Christmas without Santa Claus. With the Yuletide season now on our doorstep, Les Grands Ballets once again celebrates this happy time of the year with its annual presentation of Tchaikovsky's immensely popular ballet. The Nutcracker has, through countless productions, captivated and enchanted millions of children and adults alike. For many of us, it was the first ballet we ever saw. For some, perhaps, it remains the only ballet. It has woven a magical spell in the collective consciousness of nearly the entire civilized world, and has taken on the proportions of something akin to a ritual at Christmas time. Yet, for all its popularity today, The Nutcracker had a very shaky beginning.
The commission to write the ballet came in 1891, at the height of Tchaikovsky’s fame and popularity. His Sleeping Beauty had had a big success the year before, and now the director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, wanted another ballet from Tchaikovsky, specifically one based on Alexandre Dumas père’s French adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale Nussknacker und Mausekōnig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King) ̶ hence, the oft-quoted French title Casse-noisette, even in Russia. Vsevolozhsky drew up the scenario himself. Tchaikovsky worked closely with the great choreographer Marius Petipa, whose instructions to the composer resembled the demands of film scores today, with their precise timings in the creation of moods and representation of events. This artistic partnership resulted in music of the highest quality, thoroughly inspired in its atmospherics, richly laced with memorable tunes, and imbued with colorful orchestration. Yet Tchaikovsky had surprisingly little sympathy for the subject, and he is on record as saying that he “liked the plot of The Nutcracker very little.”
Tchaikovsky worked on The Nutcracker during February and March of 1891, including throughout his travels in Western Europe. The first act was fully sketched before Tchaikovsky sailed to America in April. Nevertheless, the score was not finished until nearly a year later. On March 19, 1892, Tchaikovsky conducted a suite drawn from the complete score at an orchestral concert in St. Petersburg. The response was enthusiastic; five of the eight numbers had to be encored. Yet the premiere of the full-length production in December was not the success everyone had expected, more for reasons of casting and choreography than for musical content. Petipa, having become ill, had entrusted much of the choreography to a substitute ̶ and inferior ̶ creator, Lev Ivanov. The audience was not prepared for a host of children on stage instead of the traditional corps de ballet, and the Sugar Plum Fairy was hardly a vision of pristine beauty.
As most concertgoers know Hoffmann’s story only through Tchaikovsky’s ballet, it is worth noting that the latter departs from the original to a significant degree. Whereas the Vsevolozhsky/Petipa/Tchaikovsky collaboration resulted in a fairytale setting focusing on the joys of Christmastide and magical, idyllic settings, Hoffmann’s tale explored the darker, unsettling aspects of the soul. As biographer John Warrack explains, “On the face of it a children’s story, this is in fact a strange and complex fantasy in which, characteristically for Hoffmann, dreams and reality, a children’s tale and more alarming undertones, nursery narrative and obscure private jokes all mingle so that the reader has his stance constantly undermined. It is an attractive but uneasy and even disturbing story. … The figure of Drosselmeyer, half Hoffmann himself and half a weird caricature in the original, survives (in Tchaikovsky) as an eccentric uncle (Hoffmann had known many, and was himself one); the mouse battle loses most of its peculiarity; and the enigmatic figure of the Nutcracker itself, half inanimate object and half suffering soul in the original, is here an object of affection who returns it by rewarding his savior, Clara, with a visit to the Kingdom of Sweets.”
