Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky watched the premier of his ballet “The Nutcracker”, on December 18th, 1892, at the Mariinksky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia. His usual work was with orchestral pieces and operas and this would only be the third ballet he had written the music for. The previous two were “Swan Lake” and “The Sleeping Beauty”. Sheesh!!
There were a number of problems plaguing the performance that December night and Tchaikovsky was never to see any of them resolved because he would be dead within 11 months. Some say he committed suicide by intentionally catching cholera. That would be a pretty hard way to go, but he was Russian, and it was the 1890s, so who knows.
The ballet was based on a story that E. T. A. Hoffman had written in 1816 called “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”. It was a long-winded and complicated story on its own but the writer Alexandre Dumas (the guy who wrote “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count Of Monte Cristo”) was able to write a somewhat neater version of it in 1844 and that was what the ballet was based on. Ever read the book “The Count of Monte Cristo”? It’s not what you might call an A-to-B script, so that Hoffman version of “The Nutcracker” must have been pretty wobbly.
Ivan Vsevolozhsky was the chap in charge of the Imperial Theatres in Saint Petersburg at that time, and it was he who had brought Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty” ballet to the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre two years earlier. He loved working with Tchaikovsky’s music and with the choreographer Marius Petipa and arranged that the two of them would work together again on “The Nutcracker” as they had done for the previous ballet.
Ivan had come up with the idea of hosting evenings at the theatre featuring both an opera and a ballet, and this night, December 18, 1892, was an all-Tchaikovsky double-header starting off with the premier of his one-act lyrical opera “Iolanta”, which typically lasts for about 2 hours. THEN they brought out “The Nutcracker”. The intermission for the ballet was around midnight!
Tchaikovsky was no idiot. He had already mashed together 8 of the major musical theme pieces from this new work into a 20-minute version that he called “The Nutcracker Suite” and had tested it with audiences 9 months earlier to see if they liked it. They absolutely did and the music became instantly popular, so he knew he had a hit on his hands. But the audience from that opening night at the Mariinsky, panned the ballet.
PANNED it!
The dancers were criticized as insipid or amateurish (one was even fat-shamed!), and the fight scenes were viewed as confusing. No one seemed to like the fact that so many of the dancers were children and people got lost once the setting for the first half was replaced by the setting of a make-believe world for the second half, after the intermission.
Also, at that time, the ballet finished up with bees dancing around a hive which might have been a push too far. Eventually that bit got dropped.
These weren’t completely unfounded criticisms. Marius, the choreographer, had become ill during rehearsals and needed to step away from the production. It was then taken over by his assistant, who had a very different style. The ballet just wasn’t ready by opening night and it must have showed.
Tchaikovsky himself thought little of the performance and described the audience as being bored by the ballet. He was a tough self-critic at the best of times and would have never imagined that his Nutcracker ballet, once the choreography was reworked by the ballet master George Balanchine for The New York City Ballet company in 1954, would become the monster hit it is with us 131 years later.
Each year during the Holiday Season, thousands of productions of “The Nutcracker Ballet” are performed all over the world. A huge percentage of children have their first exposure to professional dance through this very ballet. Many of today’s ballet dancers will say that watching “The Nutcracker” performed live was their motivation to become a dancer themselves.
It is the music of this ballet that sets the stage for the dancers to soar and to move with unimaginable grace throughout the performance. Tchaikovsky’s music transcends the ordinary and makes an army of fighting mice, the delicacy of faeries, and even the marching of tin soldiers, feel real. If you can sit through a production of this ballet and still not be swept up in the story and the music and the dancing, then your ticket has clearly been wasted.
For myself, I have many memories of the anticipation that came along with clutching a ticket in my hand for this very special ballet. Of shuffling along the row of seats and settling into my spot. Of drinking in the wonder and possibility that a beautifully appointed old concert theatre holds, while waiting impatiently for the moment when the lights in the hall would dim and the shuffling of the orchestra would still.
And then, the very music that Tchaikovsky wrote by way of introduction to the enchanting story about to be told, would start to gently cast its spell while the audience held its breath and the familiar tune of the “Miniature Overture” would start to skip around the hall in such a way as to suggest that we absolutely SHOULD expect toys to come to life and that there would be good ones and bad ones and that maybe if we could pay close enough attention, we would be able to see that the magic of our dreams was about to be released.
