How The Nutcracker Went from a Failed 1892 Premiere to Everyone's Christmas Ballet

Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker flopped at its 1892 St Petersburg premiere. The suite, then US stagings from 1944 and 1954, made it the Christmas ballet.

The Nutcracker became a Christmas tradition because its story takes place on Christmas Eve and because, from the 1940s and 1950s, American ballet companies began staging it every December until it became their most reliable box-office hit. That success was not obvious at the start. When Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's two-act ballet premiered in Saint Petersburg in 1892, it was not considered a success, and for decades it was performed far less than his other ballets. Here is how a disappointing premiere turned into one of the best-known pieces of music in the world, and what its story can teach English learners.

A commission after The Sleeping Beauty

In 1890 Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty had been a triumph. Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theatres in Russia, wanted to repeat that success and commissioned an unusual double bill: an opera, Iolanta, and a ballet to be performed on the same evening. Tchaikovsky again worked with the choreographer Marius Petipa, his partner on The Sleeping Beauty.

The ballet was conceived as a ballet-féerie, a fairy-tale spectacle full of magic and transformation scenes. Tchaikovsky himself, interestingly, was less pleased with it than with The Sleeping Beauty and accepted the commission without much enthusiasm.

From Hoffmann's dark tale to a sweet ballet

The story comes from E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, but the ballet used the gentler 1844 French version by Alexandre Dumas, The Story of a Nutcracker. Even then, the plot was heavily simplified. The ballet dropped the long story-within-a-story, "The Tale of the Hard Nut", which explains how a young man was turned into a nutcracker in the first place.

Petipa gave Tchaikovsky extremely detailed instructions for every number, down to the tempo and the number of bars. Work was interrupted when Tchaikovsky travelled to the United States for about twenty-five days to conduct at the opening of Carnegie Hall, and he wrote parts of the score in Rouen, France.

The suite that came first

Before the ballet had even been staged, Tchaikovsky selected eight numbers for a concert piece, The Nutcracker Suite, Op. 71a. It was first performed on 19 March 1892 in Saint Petersburg, and almost every number was encored. The suite became popular in concert halls long before the full ballet did, and it later reached a huge audience through Disney's Fantasia in 1940.

This explains a curious fact about The Nutcracker: many people know the music by heart without ever having seen the ballet.

The 1892 premiere: why it disappointed

The double premiere of Iolanta and The Nutcracker took place on 18 December 1892 (6 December in the Old Style calendar used in Russia) at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, with Riccardo Drigo conducting. Petipa had begun the choreography in August 1892, but illness forced him to step back, and his assistant of seven years, Lev Ivanov, completed it. Ivanov is usually credited as choreographer, though some accounts of the time named Petipa.

Antonietta Dell'Era danced the Sugar Plum Fairy, Pavel Gerdt was the Prince, Stanislava Belinskaya played Clara, and students of the Imperial Ballet School took the children's roles. Critics complained that the libretto was lopsided and unfaithful to Hoffmann, that too much of it was given to children, and that the ballerina did not dance until the Grand Pas de Deux, which came near midnight. Alexandre Benois found the battle scene confusing. The music fared better, although even here opinions were divided.

The story in two acts

Act I is set in Nuremberg on Christmas Eve, at the Stahlbaum family's party. The mysterious godfather Drosselmeyer arrives with toys, including a wooden nutcracker that Clara's brother Fritz breaks and Drosselmeyer repairs. After midnight the Christmas tree grows enormous, the nutcracker comes to life, and toy soldiers fight an army of mice led by the seven-headed Mouse King. Clara throws her slipper at the king, distracting him long enough for the nutcracker to win. The nutcracker turns into a prince and leads her through a snowy pine forest where snowflakes dance.

Act II takes place in the Land of Sweets, ruled by the Sugar Plum Fairy. The Prince tells how Clara saved him, and sweets from around the world dance in her honour: Spanish chocolate, Arabian coffee, Chinese tea, a Russian Trepak, and Mother Ginger with her Polichinelles. The Waltz of the Flowers and the Grand Pas de Deux follow, and Clara leaves in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

A new instrument: the celesta

One reason the music sounds so magical is the celesta, a keyboard instrument with a bell-like tone. Tchaikovsky had already used it in his symphonic ballad The Voyevoda (1891), but it is the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" that made it famous. Other favourite numbers include the March, the Trepak, the Waltz of the Snowflakes and the Waltz of the Flowers. The great Adagio of the Grand Pas de Deux is built on a simple one-octave scale, reportedly because a friend bet Tchaikovsky he could not write a good melody on it.

Slow growth outside Russia

For years the ballet was rarely performed. Alexander Gorsky's 1919 production gave the Sugar Plum Fairy's dances to an adult Clara and Prince, and Vasili Vainonen's 1934 version did the same. An abridged version appeared in Budapest in 1927, and the first complete performance outside Russia took place in England in 1934, staged by Nicholas Sergeyev after Petipa's choreography.

America makes it a December habit

The turning point came in the United States. The San Francisco Ballet gave the first complete American performance on 24 December 1944, staged by Willam Christensen. Ten years later, in 1954, George Balanchine's production for New York City Ballet, with Maria Tallchief as the Sugar Plum Fairy, proved decisive: it became an annual Christmas event and was copied across the country.

Today major American ballet companies earn roughly 40% of their annual ticket revenue from The Nutcracker. Not everyone is happy about this. In 2009 the Washington Post critic Sarah Kaufman argued that the ballet's dominance had made American ballet cautious, and later critics have questioned the stereotyped staging of the Chinese and Arabian dances. Alastair Macaulay of The New York Times replied that Tchaikovsky "never intended his Chinese and Arabian music to be ethnographically correct".

Beyond the theatre

The ballet has been filmed many times, including a 1985 film of Pacific Northwest Ballet's production and a 1993 film of Balanchine's version with Macaulay Culkin as the Prince. Its music has been rearranged in every style imaginable, from Duke Ellington's jazz version to the rock arrangements of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. A ballet that critics once found unbalanced is now, for millions of families, simply the sound of December.

Learn with The Nutcracker: English phrases for the holidays

Phrase	Meaning	Example
a tough nut to crack	a difficult problem or person	This grammar point is a tough nut to crack.
to get off to a rocky start	to begin badly	The ballet got off to a rocky start in 1892.
to steal the show	to get the most attention	The Sugar Plum Fairy stole the show.
a sweet tooth	a love of sweet food	With my sweet tooth, I'd love the Land of Sweets.
to become a fixture	to become a regular part of something	The ballet became a fixture of December.

Try this: Describe your own holiday tradition in three English sentences, using "a sweet tooth" and "become a fixture".