(DON’T BE A GRINCH)
The Nutcracker has already changed a lot over time…
discover how
Our adventure begins over 200 years ago, in the early 1800s, when a man named ETA Hoffman first published The Nutcracker and The Mouse King in Berlin, Germany, in 1816. Those were weird times. While it was considered a novella fairy tale, quite popular for children in those days, it also was contemporary with the Brothers Grimm whose style was dark and twisty and more than a little disturbing.
This couldn’t have really come as a surprise. Hoffman himself was an usual guy. He wasn’t actually German, he was born in Russia. And ETA stood for ‘Ernst Theodor Amadeus’, but that wasn’t even his real name. His real name was Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (but he changed it, because he was obsessed with Mozart). In a way, Hoffman was his first own rewrite. He trained as a lawyer and served as a law officer; he turned his attention to music, working as a composer and a music critic. He worked as an artist. He worked as a theater director. And eventually he became a writer, with his Nutcracker debuting just four years after the Brothers Grimm released their first volume of fairy in 1812.
No longer widely circulated today, the original Nutcracker was a bit creepy. Hoffman himself was a German Romantic author of Gothic horror (which some say grew out of the 1790s). He had a taste for the macabre combined with realism and ultimately influenced Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Edgar Allan Poe. As Tracy Wilson puts it, “Hoffman’s fiction tended to be pretty haunting and strange, with stories that carried a whole sense of ambiguity.”
The actual original Nutcracker doesn’t even take place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but all the way spread out over the 12 days of Christmas. Christmas Day itself is hardly acknowledged. The original climax is over a week later (on the Feast of the Epiphany). In the battle scene, Marie, not Clara, is very close to a glass chest with all her toys in it, but she crashes into it. A blade of glass cuts into her arm so deeply that she bleeds all over the place and passes out unconscious. Ever seen a ballet where Clara gets slashed by the shards of her own toy chest? Pretty dark.
Again in the original battle scene, right before Marie cuts her arm, when she throws her shoe to distract the mouse king, it’s written in such a way that she does so unconsciously (as if her throwing the shoe wasn’t a genius strategic decision that saves her friends life and wins the war). Rather, Hoffman portrays it as if she was just in the heat of the moment, she didn’t really know what she was doing. With a major victory like that, which could have been an empowering moment for a young girl, all credit is taken away from her.
In the end of this original tale, while Marie does eventually share her dream with her family — they mock her. They dismiss her. They completely minimize her. And Drosselmeyer, who was in the dream and who Marie believes does know the dream was real, completely gaslights her. She attempts to present them with proof that he was there and that he knows what she’s talking about, and her Godfather lies to her face. He calls her ridiculous. He creates a fantasy and then betrays her with it. And all of this was The Nutcracker as with world knew it for 28 years.
Hoffman dies in 1822, living to see only six years of his Nutcracker in publication. Eighteen years after Hoffman dies, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is born in 1840. And when Tchaikovsky is only a four year-old little boy himself, French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas finally adapts The Nutcracker in 1844 into a simpler (less dark) version.
And yet, it would be another 48 years until something a modern audience would recognize. Although composer Carl Reinecke was the first to create eight musical pieces in 1855 based on the story (eventually performed with narration telling a short adaptation of the story), in 1891 Tchaikovsky uses Dumas adaptation to finally begin composing a ballet. Marius Petipa simultaneously begins to choreograph the ballet, but becomes ill, so Lev Ivanov completes it for him. It was only the second time the team had ever worked together.
But Tchaikovsky stumbled. He found out in a newspaper that his beloved sister is dead, and he’s flung into a deep depression. He couldn’t finish his second act due to grief and had to borrow from folk music instead. Nevertheless, at the grand Imperial Mariinsky Theater, Tchaikovsky and Petipa’s first ever Nutcracker Ballet finally debuted in 1892. But it’s a complete flop. The next year Tchaikovsky dies in Russia, ultimately believing on his deathbed nothing of the Nutcracker ever was, or ever would be, a success.
This sad fate would be true for The Nutcracker’s entire creative team. Lev Ivanov died in 1901. Petipa died in 1910. They all outlived Tchaikovsky who died in 1893 (this was his last ballet). And none of them ever met Hoffman, who died in 1822. Despite co-creating one of the most recognizable children stories of all time, Petipa, Tchaikovsky and Hoffman all died never having become fathers with children of their own.
Meanwhile in America, the tea was already brewing. In the early 1890s, orchestras in Europe and North America began performing the Nutcracker Suite — Tchaikovsky’s music becoming more popular than ballet and Hoffman’s book combined. America’s vast community of immigrants loved the folk music and the sounds became widely recognizable on both sides of the Atlantic.
But the chance wasn’t over for the Nutcracker Ballet to become a hit. In 1917, after the Russian revolution, many Russian ballerinas and composers began fleeing to America. In 1934, The Nutcracker was performed outside of Russia for the first time in London with choreographic notes from Nicholas Sergeyev. In 1940, the Ballet Russe Monte Carlo presented selections from the Nutcracker while on tour in the United States.
Clara became a California girl in 1944 when The Nutcracker was performed for the first time in the United States with the San Francisco Ballet. Willam Christensen, the director at the time, was the choreographer of America’s first full-length Nutcracker. He studied a copy of the well-notated score from the Library of Congress, and George Balanchine shared boyhood memories of the Petipa-Ivanov production which he danced for the Mariinsky Theater in 1892.
It was not until 138 years after that far away tale from ETA Hoffman that the ballet finally became a smash hit. George Balanchine himself choreographed The Nutcracker for The New York City Ballet and its debut in 1954 was a resounding success. Three years later, when the production was broadcast on television by CBS, it was instituted as a cultural tradition.
“in some ways, there is no original nutcracker. the story
has been cancelled, rewritten, and adapted from
RUSSIA TO GERMANY TO FRANCE AND WITHIN THE US.
AS ALL ART DOES, IT WILL ONLY
CONTINUE TO EVOLVE.”
— EMILIA FERRARA