The season of childlike wonder, Christmas, embraces both the sacred wonder of the Nativity and its message of peace on earth and goodwill to men, and the natural wonder of the falling snow.In St. Petersburg there is a bonus; the cultivated wonder of music, and the city's stages are all a-twinkle in the effort to keep the Christmas spirit glowing, with the Mariinsky and Musorgsky theaters, and the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory all offering productions of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker.
The Nutcracker needs no introduction. Even in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, you couldn't throw a quahog without hitting somebody who could readily identify Tchaikovsky's music. Yet, as with Christmas itself, there is a magic to the Nutcracker which never stales.
The Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, is where this expatriate first saw the Nutcracker staged. My little sister danced in an amateur production by her ballet studio. The Capitol had long before been made into a movie-house; but the theater's temporary reclamation by the performing arts added an additional charm to this juvenile but magical production.
The story of the ballet goes back to the highly colorful musician, music writer, novelist, painter and jurist, ETA Hoffman. This quintessential romantic had been christened Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, but his admiration for Mozart prompted him to substitute "Amadeus" for the last name. A collection of tales by Hoffman, published in Berlin in 1816, included "The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King."
Alexandre Dumas serialized a simplified version of the tale in Le Nouveau Magasin des Enfants in 1844. Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg and dedicatee of Tchaikovsky's ballet Sleeping Beauty, adapted Dumas' version of the story for the libretto of Tchaikovsky's last ballet.
If for Tchaikovsky the symphony was "the musical confession of the soul," and if his operas are dominated by the Pushkinesque tragedy of Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, all three of his ballets are devoted to the enchantments of fairy-land.
Although this suggests some parallel with Rimsky-Korsakov (most of whose operas are "musical fairy-tales"), Tchaikovsky was outside the circle of the composers of "The Mighty Handful," who so vocally espoused the cause of an indigenous Russian music.
But in Stravinsky's opinion, Tchaikovsky was "the most Russian of us all," and there is much in the score of the Nutcracker to support this view: the pas-de-deux danced by the Sugar Plum Fairy and her cavalier, the trumpet tune in the middle of the Dance of the Reed Pipes, and of course the Trepak.
There is not a superfluous note in the score, and Tchaikovsky's use of the orchestra is strikingly brilliant. These virtues more than compensate for weaknesses in the libretto (a simplification of a simplification, in which all the action is spent before Act II).
The clarity and aptness of the instrumentation is of the spirit as Rimsky-Korsakov's, without any specific debt to the latter. The clarinets which chant a Georgian lullaby in the Arabian Dance, the flute and campanelli (orchestra bells) in the Chinese Dance, the playful flickers of different instrumental colors which brilliantly suggest snowfall for the Waltz of the Snowflakes.
And of course the celesta in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, a masterful sonic objet trouve. The instrument was invented by Victor Mustel and was patented in Paris in 1890. There Tchaikovsky happened upon the instrument en route to New York (Walter Damrosch had invited him to participate in the music festival celebrating the opening of Carnegie Hall).
The Nutcracker is now so deeply ingrained in world culture that it comes as a surprise that the ballet's premiere had a tepid reception.
That first production was handicapped by the fact that Marius Petipa, the choreographer, fell seriously ill shortly before rehearsals began. After the premiere at the Mariinsky on December 18, 1892, Tchaikovsky confided to a friend that the ballet, "despite its opulence, proved rather boring."
But the ballet has well survived its inauspicious beginnings, and has captured the hearts of millions, for many of whom the Nutcracker is their sole experience of ballet.