Tchaikovsky — The Nutcracker

A magical musical journey to the land where all good dreams come true.

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When?

Premiered at the Imperial Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1892, the same year that:

• The Russian biologist Dmitri Iosifovich Ivanovsky is the first person to discover a virus, in tobacco plants.
• Oscar Wilde’s comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan premieres in London. Rehearsals for his sensual (and gory) tragedy Salome, in which Sarah Bernhardt is to appear, are stopped because the British Lord Chamberlain deems the play to be sacrilegious.
• The Australian Cricket Council announces an inter-colonial cricket competition, to be known as the Sheffield Shield.
• The Limelight Department is officially established in Melbourne by the Salvation Army. At this stage, it’s using lantern slides to project hand-coloured photographs onto a screen, but soon it will begin integrating film segments with the slides, making it one of the first film studios in the world.
• In Canada, James Naismith publishes, in the Springfield YMCA International Training School newspaper, the rules of a new game he has invented: basketball.

Fast Facts

• Tchaikovsky wrote the music for three of the best-loved ballets of all time: Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.
• The Nutcracker was one of his last compositions, written the year before he died. It tells the story of a magical Christmas Eve at the home of a little girl called Clara, when toys come to life to protect Clara against an attack by the terrifying Mouse King and his followers. A toy nutcracker given to Clara as a Christmas present leads the dolls in battle, but things go badly until Clara saves the day by throwing her slipper at the Mouse King. The Nutcracker immediately turns into a handsome Prince who takes Clara through a snow-covered forest to the Kingdom of Sweets. There she is welcomed by the Sugar Plum Fairy, who puts on an elaborate entertainment to thank her for saving the Prince. Delicious treats from around the world dance in her honour, including Chocolate from Spain, Coffee from Arabia, Tea from China, and Mirlitons (a sweet pastry) from France. Finally the Sugar Plum Fairy herself dances for Clara, and the evening ends in a grand waltz.
• To show in music the delicate steps of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Tchaikovsky used an instrument which had only just been invented: the celesta. This is a keyboard instrument which looks like a small upright piano, but inside, instead of strings, there are dozens of little metal bars, a bit like a glockenspiel. It sounds like tiny fairy bells being played. Tchaikovsky heard a celesta while on a visit to Paris and realised at once that its glistening tones would be perfect for the Sugar Plum Fairy. So he had one brought into Russia — but secretly, to make sure that nobody got wind of his brilliant idea and used it first!
• The ballet itself wasn’t a hit at the premiere: there’s not much of a story line in the second half, and the role of Clara and her brother Fritz were danced by real children — dance students from the Imperial Ballet School — at the first performance. Tchaikovsky’s music, however, was a great success from the start, admired for its beautiful melodies and the imaginative colours of the orchestral writing.

(Left to right) Lydia Rubtsova as Marianna, Stanislava Belinskaya as Clara and Vassily Stukolkinas Fritz, in the original production of The Nutcracker (Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, 1892). [Wikimedia Commons]