Nutcracker Stories
Sergei Legat as the Nutcracker, Stanislava Belinskay as Clara. The Nutcracker, Mariinsky Theatre 1892 production, act I. Mariinsky Theatre Archive.
The days are getting shorter, Christmas is approaching. In the US and the UK, this means that The Nutcracker season has started. For a whole month, New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet (London) and Birmingham Royal Ballet will perform nothing but The Nutcracker. New York City Ballet, whose version of The Nutcracker initiated The Nutcracker Christmas craze, performs the ballet a whooping forty-seven times each holiday season. Yes, you have read this correctly. The dancers will get only one day off every week, performing the ballet once a day during the week, and twice daily on weekends and a few select days.
Yes, that’s a lot of Nutcrackers. . . For those who are now feeling a bit overwhelmed, or who run risk of turning into a “Nutcracker Grinch,” here some intriguing facts to reignite your Nutcracker spirit:
The ballet is based on French writer Alexandre Dumas’s version of the much scarier German original, E.T.H. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It was Peter Tchaikovsky’s third ballet. The first, Swan Lake, had not been a success at its 1877 premiere in Moscow. Some critics had dismissed Tchaikovsky’s music as too noisy, too Wagnerian, too symphonic, not knowing that this score would forever change to trajectory of ballet music. In 1890, Tchaikovsky’s second ballet score, The Sleeping Beauty, premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Tchaikovsky had worked with choreographer Marius Petipa on the production, the same Petipa who would create the definite version of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in 1895.
The collaboration between Petipa and Tchaikovsky would set a new standard for classical ballet, but when Tchaikovsky received Petipa’s libretto for The Nutcracker, he balked, writing anxiously that The Nutcracker had turned out to be “a disgusting thing.” The first act of the ballet follows the magical Christmas story of little Clara and her toy Nutcracker, but Petipa chose to ignore the two main characters and any idea of plot development in the second act, envisioning a series of dances performed by sweets in honour of the girl and the Nutcracker, now transformed into a prince. Tchaikovsky panicked. He was a tortured soul; his music was deeply emotional and psychological; composing the musical equivalent of a candy store was a nightmare come true. Tchaikovsky only calmed down after the former diplomat Ivan Vsevolozhsky, now Director of the Imperial Theatres, cunningly reassured him that the Imperial family was extremely interested in his new composition.
But then disaster struck: one of Petipa’s five daughters died and the grieving father fell so ill that he was unable to work on the ballet. The most important ballet premiere of the season was handed over to Lev Ivanov, Petipa’s deputy, one of the unsung, quiet heroes of ballet history. People at the theatre joked that somebody with such a common name could never amount to anything great. Ivanov was not born under a lucky star: an illegitimate child, he spent the first three years of his life in an orphanage; he had a remarkable musical talent that was never fully developed; his wife left him because he didn’t earn enough money; trying to make ends meet, he sought solace in alcohol. If only he had known that he would posthumously (after his death) be hailed as choreographic genius for the waltz of the snowflakes in The Nutcracker and for the choreography he created for the corps de ballet of swans in Petipa’s Swan Lake. The premiere of The Nutcracker took place on 18 December 1892, in a double-bill with Tchaikovsky’s last opera Iolanta, and was not considered a great success.
Fast-forward more than half a century, to New York City, and to George Balanchine, a Russian émigré who had also been an unhappy small boy when he quite unexpectedly found himself a border at Imperial Ballet School. Balanchine had danced the role of the Nutcracker Prince when he was fifteen years old. Like Ivanov, Balanchine was highly musical and loved Tchaikovsky. The premiere of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker took place on 2 February 1954 and therefore didn’t even coincide with the Christmas season. But the production’s blockbuster potential became obvious during its first successful run, primarily because of Balanchine’s choreography, Tchaikovsky’s music, and the many children on stage, but also because of the miraculously growing giant Christmas trees and the beautiful costumes and striking sets. Today, there are forty stagehands working behind the scenes at each performance to make the visual miracles happen. And if you can’t watch the show in New York, you can watch it on the screen: the production was filmed in 1993 with a star-studded New York City Ballet cast – and Macauly Culkin from Home Alone as the Nutcracker prince.