'The Nutcracker': A Search for Meaning
'Tis the season for 'The Nutcracker'! Is it just a confection, or does it have hidden intentions? In this article, balletomane Richard Murphy reminds us of how this most well-known of ballets came into being.
After the success of The Sleeping Beauty, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the Director of the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg, proposed uniting Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky (the composer) and Marius Petipa (the choreographer) to work together on a new fairy-tale ballet. Vsevolozhsky devised a scenario based upon E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Before the ballet was finished, Petipa became seriously ill and had to withdraw. The task of choreographing the ballet was entrusted to his assistant Lev Ivanov who followed the ballet masterplan and stage directions drawn up by Petipa.
Both Tchaikovsky and Petipa considered the scenario provided by Vsevolozhsky to be inferior to The Sleeping Beauty and were unenthusiastic. Consequently, the creation of the work did not proceed smoothly. Tchaikovsky’s interpretation often clashed with Petipa’s, both the libretto and choreographic structure had to be revisited several times, and a fluid consistency was never properly achieved.
At the premiere in December, 1892, the opening party scene was deemed pleasant but not very interesting, the dancing dolls childish, and the fight with the mice which involved “disorderly pushing about from corner to corner and running backwards and forwards” quite amateurish. The Peterburgskaya Gazeta reviewer declared “... it is a pity that so much fine music is expended on nonsense unworthy of attention ...”.
In addition to structural defects, the ballet suffers from the weak libretto. The story has no moral and there is no character development of the story protagonist, Clara, who is, against all established rules of storytelling, sidelined in Act II. This has led to various attempts to find some meaning for the ballet in even the smallest piece of evidence.
In Act I, the adults dance to Tchaikovsky’s version of a well-known 18th century humorous French song (Bon voyage, M. Dumolet) and Petipa originally had listed a dance to a popular song from the French revolution to be included but removed it. This led to speculation by Fedor Lopukhov, a Soviet and Russian dancer and choreographer, that for Petipa the battle of the mice and soldiers was intended to be an allegory for the French Revolution. Notwithstanding that the soldiers ultimately won the battle this was not something the Russian authorities would have appreciated on the Imperial stage.
At this time, Tchaikovsky was very enthusiastic about Léo Delibe’s ballet Coppélia and the popular Viennese ballet Die
Puppenfee (The Fairy Doll) and clearly could not resist adding his own dancing dolls to Act One. Drosselmeyer was a toy maker but his bringing dancing doll automata to entertain the party guests was not in the original Hoffmann story. Tchaikovsky’s friend Nikolay Kaskin wrote regarding this: “The latter shows how Pyotr Ilyich had moved on from the magic fairy-tale genre, as in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, to that of the puppet-theatre story”.
Before heading to America, but while staying in Paris, Tchaikovsky could not write a single note for three weeks. It was only after the death of his beloved sister Aleksandra (Sasha) and on his return to St Petersburg that he finally started working again intensively and finished the ballet “with a feverish haste”. This has led to speculation that for Tchaikovsky the ballet gained a deeper meaning after his sister’s death. Roland John Wiley, an American musicologist and writer who has closely studied Tchaikovsky’s ballets, postulated that perhaps he identified Aleksandra as the Sugarplum Fairy and even himself as Drosselmeyer.
But, instead of speculating about intended meanings for the ballet I believe it is far more profitable to derive meaning from what we see. In essence the ballet comprises two parties: the first (Act I) is a perfectly ordinary 19th century Christmas party, enlivened by the arrival of Clara’s godfather Drosselmeyer. The party ends with the traditional grandfather dance after which the guests depart. Clara falls asleep and has a vivid dream of a battle between rats and toy soldiers led by the Nutcracker doll (Drosselmeyer’s present to Clara) who magically comes to life.
The second party (Act II) is held in the Land of the Sweets and hosted by the Sugarplum Fairy. While the party at Clara’s home is down-to-earth, with a mixture of joys and disappointments, good and bad behavour (exemplified by Fritz and his friends twice noisily interrupting the proceedings and Fritz breaking Clara’s Nutcracker doll), the party at the Sugarplum Fairy’s domain is one of heavenly manners, gracefulness and in all ways is how a child imagines a party should be conducted. The Sugarplum Fairy is Clara’s idealized vision of the beautiful adult woman she would like to grow up to be.
The two parties, one in the ordinary everyday world, the other in a magical world of the imagination, are connected by Ivanov’s Waltz of the Snowflakes. Many Australians will not have experienced how falling snow not only blankets roads and houses turning a dull landscape white, clean and bright but, as snow absorbs sound, it turns the world into one of magical silence. For Russians, the transformation of the mundane, everyday world to a mystical world through the fall of snow was something they had all experienced. For them, the Snowflakes Waltz as a bridge between the two worlds was a perfect transformation piece. Father Joseph Mohr had already recognized the transformative power of snow when he wrote the world’s most popular Christmas carol in 1816 and which, set to music by Franz Xaver Gruber, was first performed in 1818 - “Silent night! Holy night! All is calm! All is bright!”
The Nutcracker is the most popular ballet in the world because in America the ballet has become a symbol for the miracle of Christmas, and it is thus staged every year by ballet companies large and small. In Australia, only Queensland Ballet under Li Cunxin has adopted this annual Christmas tradition. Although The Nutcracker is a childish ballet with an unsatisfactory story and structure, it has survived because of the brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s music, and it is one of the most important ballets in a company’s repertoire – because it is widely recognized by parents as an acceptable spectacle for the entertainment of their children, and for a lucky few may even feature their children on stage. It is no exaggeration therefore to state that The Nutcracker ballet’s prime role today is as an incubator of future dancers and future audiences.
