World Premiere: December 18, 1892

Most Recent HSO Performance: May 13, 2012

Instrumentation: 3 flutes with second and third flute doubling on piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, tambourine, tamtam, ratchet, castanets, cymbals, triangle, bass drum, snare drum, chimes, whipcrack, suspended cymbal, toydrums, gunshot, harp, celeste, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 20'

Act I Finale from The Nutcracker, Op. 71 (1891-1892)

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

(Born May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk Died November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg)

Late in 1890, Tchaikovsky was approached by Prince Ivan Vselvolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg, and Marius Petipa, the French dancer and choreographer who created an unprecedented standard of ballet production and execution after settling in Russia in 1847, to compose a full evening’s entertainment — a one-act opera and a ballet. The subject for the opera was to be of Tchaikovsky’s choice (he picked King René’s Daughter by the Danish dramatist Hendrik Herz, which the composer’s brother Modest turned into a libretto titled Iolanthe), but that for the ballet was specified as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, one of the most popular tales in Russia at the time. Tchaikovsky had read Hoffmann’s Nutcracker in 1882 “with great pleasure,” and he accepted the commission.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (he changed his third named from Wilhelm for love of Mozart), born in 1776, was a German writer, painter and musician whose life and works were inflamed by the ardent spirit of Romanticism. As a young man, he studied law, and held positions in the Prussian bureaucracy until Napoleon overthrew the government in 1806. Thereafter he served as an opera conductor in Bamberg, Dresden and Leipzig, and took up musical composition, producing a symphony, a ballet, some sacred works, a few chamber pieces and twelve operas. He returned to government service in 1816, as a justice of the supreme court in Berlin, a post he retained until his death in 1822. Hoffmann turned to writing late in his career, after he had moved to Berlin. He produced two novels and a treatise on the problems of theater direction, but he is best known for his collections of short stories that explore the fantastic, grotesque and even sinister aspects of the imagination, often with sharp wit and deep psychological insight. (A talented artist, he also illustrated several of his own books.) Hoffmann was a strong influence on Edgar Allan Poe and other 19th-century writers of fantasy, and his tales served as inspiration for compositions by Wagner (Die Meistersinger), Offenbach (The Tales of Hoffmann) and Delibes (Coppélia), as well as Tchaikovsky.

The scenario devised for the new ballet by Petipa, who had also choreographed the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty, was not based directly on Hoffmann’s original story, however, but rather on a French adaptation by Alexandre Dumas pére that considerably softened the grotesque elements and erotic undertones of the German Romanticist’s narrative. Tchaikovsky objected to the lack of faithfulness to Hoffmann’s original, much of whose interest for him lay precisely in its juxtaposition of the naïve, idyllic images of youth with moments of grotesquerie, but resigned himself to his contractual agreement, and told Modest shortly after starting composition in February 1891 that “I am beginning to be reconciled to the subject.”

Just as he was undertaking Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky was invited to the United States to conduct his music at the inaugural festivities celebrating the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York City. He agreed to go, and in March set out on a concert tour that took him en route across Germany and to Paris. Always interested in novel sounds, Tchaikovsky heard in Paris the celesta, a recent invention of the celebrated harmonium builder, Victor Mustel, and realized that its ethereal tone would be perfect for his new ballet. He urged his publisher, Jurgenson, to obtain one immediately: “Have it sent directly to St. Petersburg, but no one there must know about it. I am afraid Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov might hear of it and make use of it before I do. I expect it to make a tremendous impression.” (Tchaikovsky first used the instrument in his symphonic poem The Voyevoda in 1891. The French composer Ernest Chausson may have been the first to include it in an orchestral score, in his incidental music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Paris in 1888.) 

Tchaikovsky was home from his American tour by May, and resumed work immediately on Nutcracker. He finished sketching the score by the end of the following month, though not without the misgivings he usually expressed over his new works. “The ballet is infinitely worse than The Sleeping Beauty, that much is certain,” he lamented to his brother Modest. ”Let’s see how the opera will turn out.” Like the true professional composer he had become, however, he labored on despite his doubts, working on Iolanthe during the fall, and completing the orchestration of Nutcracker by the following February. With the premiere of the new ballet and opera delayed until December 1892, he conducted some of his new music at a concert in St. Petersburg on March 19th. The suite of eight numbers he extracted from the complete score of the ballet was so successful that five of the movements were immediately encored. The premiere of the full ballet on December 18th, though lavishly mounted, fared less well. Casting changes and the public’s increasing familiarity with subject and score soon led to Nutcracker’s wide acceptance, however, and it has remained one of the most popular of all ballets.

*  *  *

The ballet opens with a Christmas party at the home of the President of the Town Council and his wife. The door bursts open, and Clara and Fritz, the President’s children, run in, accompanied by some of their playmates. The President suggests that the children don paper hats and parade about the room (March). Among the adults who subsequently arrive is the mysterious Councilor Drosselmeyer, who gives Clara a large nutcracker with a grotesque head. Fritz takes it from her, and breaks the Nutcracker in trying to crack open an overly large nut. Clara carefully gathers up the pieces. The party ends. The guests leave, the children are sent to bed; the President turns out the lights and retires. Clara steals back into the living room, lit only by the candles on the tree, to look again at her broken Nutcracker.

Midnight strikes, the clock’s face having taken on the features of Drosselmeyer. Mice scurry out from the corners of the room. Clara, terrified, climbs into a chair, only to see the Christmas tree grow magically to an enormous size. The gingerbread men left over from tea suddenly spring to life as soldiers to battle the mice. They are being beaten (and eaten) by the mice, when the Nutcracker jumps up to become their leader. He is confronted by the Mouse King himself, and appears about to meet his fate when Clara hurls her slipper at the rodent-monster and kills him. The mice, leaderless, flee, and the Nutcracker is transformed into a gallant Prince. As reward for saving his life, he invites Clara to visit his kingdom. She accepts. In the finale of Act I, titled Scene in the Pine Forest (Journey Through the Snow), Clara and the Prince travel through a dense, snow-covered forest, guided by gnomes bearing torches. The travelers are met on their arrival by the King and Queen of the Snowflakes, who dance with their subjects (Waltz of the Snowflakes).

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda