page_title: The Nutcracker
section_title: Historian Opinion
hierarchical_section_title: The Nutcracker / Sugar Plum Fairy / Historian Opinion
caption_attribution_description: Miyako Yoshida and Steven McRae as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her prince in the Royal Ballet production of the Nutcracker on Wednesday 2 December 2009.
context_page_description: The Nutcracker is a classical ballet in two acts. It is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It tells the story of a little girl who goes to the Land of Sweets on Christmas Eve. Ivan Vsevolozhsky and Marius Petipa adapted Hoffmann's story for the ballet. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the music. Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov designed the dances. The Nutcracker was first performed at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 18 December 1892 to a modest success and rarely seen the next years.
  In 1940, Walt Disney used some of the Nutcracker music in his animated movie Fantasia, which led to an interest in the ballet. Interest grew when George Balanchine's The Nutcracker was televised in the late 1950s. The ballet has been performed in many different places since then. Before the first performance, Tchaikovsky took some numbers from the ballet to form the Nutcracker Suite. This work was a great success on the concert stage, and is still played today.
context_section_description: In his biography about Tchaikovsky John Warrack points out that the ballet's greatest weakness is its story. It did not permit Tchaikovsky to musically develop the ballet in the manner of Swan Lake or The Sleeping Beauty. What few symphonic passages exist in the ballet (mostly in Act 1) are not the best Tchaikovsky wrote. Warrack thinks that the "essential nature" of the ballet is found in the separate numbers. Tchaikovsky knew this when he put together the Nutcracker Suite to promote the complete ballet. Because the story was so weak and did not permit symphonic development, Tchaikovsky indulged his taste for "prettiness" in the separate numbers. This is what makes The Nutcracker, according to Warrack, an "entertainment of genius".
  In the biography  Tchaikovsky, writer David Brown points out that Tchaikovsky was not happy with The Nutcracker and complained to his friends about the difficulty of setting the tale to music. Brown asks why Tchaikovsky would ever let himself be persuaded to accept the story as the subject for a ballet. He points out that Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty were "dramatically meaty and deeply serious" while The Nutcracker was "trite ... [and] pointless." The ballet has no true culmination he writes. He then asks, "What was it all about anyway? The Nutcracker is meaningless in the profoundest sense." He decides that the ballet is the "most inconsequential" of all the composer's mature works for theatre, and "its dramatic structure the least satisfactory." While Brown never gives his approval to The Nutcracker, he thinks Tchaikovsky did a remarkable job despite the "appalling limitations of the subject."
caption: The Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier take their bows at the Royal Ballet
exif: {}