SYMHC Classics: Nutcracker

This 2021 episode covers how The Nutcracker is a Russian adaptation of a German story that wasn’t really a Christmas staple in its home country.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The first performance of the ballet The Nutcracker
took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on December sixth, eighteen
ninety two, in the old style calendar that Russia was
still using at the time. That is December eighteenth on
the Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar we used today.
We are bringing our episode on the Nutcracker out us
today's Saturday. Classic course, it's one hundred and thirty third

(00:25):
birthday at least approximately if you sort of disregard the
calendar math. This episode originally came out on December thirteenth,
twenty twenty one. Please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome

(00:51):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
The Nutcracker. It has become such a huge tradition for
so many people around Christmas. I know, for my own part,
my mom and I went to the North Carolina School
of the Arts production of The Nutcracker together for many,
many years. We had a family friend a little older

(01:13):
than me who went from being Clara as a child
to being asked to come back and be the Sugarplum
Ferry after she had gone on to continue her dance
education in New York. For a whole lot of people,
the Nutcracker is the first ballet they ever experience, or
maybe the only ballet they ever experience, And it's by

(01:35):
far the biggest show and the biggest source of ticket
revenue for a lot of ballet companies. And even if
you have never experienced this whole ballet, music from The
Nutcracker has also become a huge part not just of
the Christmas season, but also beyond it. Like I can
even remember a commercial from the nineteen eighties that set

(02:01):
a smurfberry crunch jingle to the march from Act one.
I will maybe sing that in our behind the scenes, Okay,
I will try to remember that. You just said that.
It's a little odd when you think about it, that
the Nutcracker ballet has become such a phenomenon, particularly in

(02:23):
North America, but it's also spread to other places too,
considering that it is a Russian adaptation of a German
story that was never really a Christmas staple in its
home country. So that is the story that we are
going to tell on the show today. The ballet The
Nutcracker is based on the eighteen sixteen story The Nutcracker

(02:47):
and the Mouse King by Arned Theodore Amadeus Hoffman or
Eta Hoffman. His name at birth was actually urned Theodore Viilhelm,
but he changed Vilhelm to Amadeus out of admiration for
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Hoffmann was born in seventeen seventy six
in Koenigsburg, Prussia now Kaliningrad, Russia. Although he spent most

(03:08):
of his adult life in what is now Germany, Kauffman
wore a lot of hats. He trained as a lawyer
and served as a law officer before turning his attention
to music. He worked as a composer and a music critic.
He was also an artist, a theater director, and a writer,
and his written work included a lot of fairy tales,
including works for children. His fiction tended to be pretty

(03:32):
haunting and strange, with stories that carried a whole sense
of ambiguity. They blurred the lines or toyed with the
relationships between imagination and reality, and this included his work
for young readers, even though a lot of children's literature
at that point tended to focus more on more heavy
handed didactic stories and morality tales. That wasn't the only

(03:55):
stuff being published, but a lot of it was very,
very moral. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is sometimes
described as the first fantasy written specifically for children. The
story contains fourteen short chapters, some of which just stop
rather than reaching any sort of logical pause in the narrative.

(04:16):
There is some speculation that it was broken up this
way so that it can be read one chapter per night,
starting on Christmas Eve as the story does, and ending
with Epiphany on January sixth, so parts of the story
will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Nutcracker Belly.
The main character is a seven year old girl, although
her name is Maurice Stalbaum, not Clara Silberhouse, as it

(04:39):
is in a lot of productions of The Nutcracker. She
has a younger brother, Fritz, and an older sister, Louise,
although Louise does not play a big part in the story.
Their godfather, Drosselmeyer, is both beloved and a little frightening.
He is old and mysterious and wears an eye patch,
and he arrives on Christmas Eve with gifts for the fan.

(05:01):
One of those gifts is an ingenious clockwork palace, but
the children, especially Fritz, are quickly bored of it. The
clockwork figures just do the same thing over and over.
Then Marie finds a nutcracker among the other Christmas gifts.
Basic tools made to crack nuts have existed at least
since the fourteenth century, but carved wooden nutcracker dolls, typically

(05:25):
made to look like soldiers, started to become popular in
seventeenth century Germany. In the story, the nutcracker is meant
as a gift for everyone, but Marie is particularly taken
with it and deeply upset when her brother breaks it
by forcing it to crack a nut that is much
too big. Marie tries to bind up the nutcracker's injury

(05:47):
with a ribbon, and Drosselmeyer does a more thorough repair.
Later on that night, Marie puts the nutcracker to bed,
and that's where the name Clara comes in. Clara is
Marie's new doll, and Marie commandeer's Clara's doll bed so
that the nutcracker will have a comfortable place to recuperate.
As she is checking on the nutcracker late at night,

(06:09):
Marie sees the mouse King and his army preparing for
a war against her brother's toy soldiers, who have all
come alive. The doll Clara saves the Nutcracker when he
tries to make a foolhardy leap from the top of
a high shelf to join in the fray. Marie also
sees Drosselmeyer on top of the Grandfather clock in place

(06:30):
of the owl that is normally there, although he does
not intervene in the fight with the mice. After hitting
the mouse King with her shoe, Marie swoons and later
wakes up in her own bed. So a lot of
what we have just said follows a lot of the
action of Act I in most productions of The Nutcracker,
so if you've seen The Nutcrackers, probably pretty familiar. But

(06:52):
then Hoffmann's story. Marie cuts her arm on a piece
of broken glass during this battle, and when Drosselmeyer comes
to visit her during her recovery, he tells her a story,
one involving a royal clockmaker also named Strosslemyre, and this
story within a story, clockmaker Drosslemyre served a king and

(07:13):
queen who had a beautiful baby daughter Princess Pearlapat. The
Queen was preparing fat to make sausages or puddings, which
were the King's favorite dish, when Lady mouse Rink, who's
basically the queen of the mice, asked her for some
of it. The Queen obliged, but then Lady mouse Rank
and her kin ate so much of the fat that

(07:33):
there was not enough left for the King's puddings. The
king was furious, and Drosselmeyer, the clockmaker, decided to use
his ingenuity to build traps to get rid of all
the mice. Lady mouse Rank, of course, did not appreciate
that so many of her kin were killed in the
royal family's new mouse traps, so she cursed Princess Perlipat

(07:54):
with ugliness. After consulting with the royal astrologer, Drossalmeyer determined
that Princess Pearl could only be cured with a supernaturally
hard krakatuc nut cracked open and presented to her by
a young man who had never been shaved and never
worn boots. After years and years of searching, Drosselmeyer finally

(08:15):
found a krakatuck nut in possession of his brother in
Nuremberg and his brother's son, so his nephew turned out
to have never been shaved and never worn boots. Uncle
and nephew returned to the palace with the nut, where
a long line of potential suitors lined up to try
to bite it open. All of them failed until the

(08:38):
younger Drosselmeyer that nephew, the last in line, succeeded, But
the young Drosselmeier and Princess Perlipat did not live happily
ever after. Just after breaking the curse on the princess,
the clockmaker's nephew accidentally stepped on Lady Moushrink, killing her.
With her dying breath. Lady Mousehrink cursed him, transforming him

(08:59):
in to a nutcracker. Princess Pearlapat, horrified, banished the nutcracker
and his uncle, the clockmaker. The Royal Astronomer, who was
also exiled for his role in all of this, predicted
that the Nutcracker's curse would be lifted only if someone
fell in love with him. Of course, at this point, Marie,
hearing this story, concludes that it is real that her

(09:22):
beloved Nutcracker toy is really the transmogrified nephew of the
Royal Clockmaker, and that royal clockmaker is none other than
her godfather Drossalmyer. Marie demands to know why Drosselemire is
not helping his nephew, after all, she saw him right
there on the clock on the night that the Nutcracker

(09:43):
fought the mouse King. Once Marie has deduced what's going on,
the mouse King starts demanding tribute, eating his way through
all her treats and toys. Then one day she notices
that the Nutcracker has a spot of blood on his neck.
As she's cleaning it off, he asks for a sword.
She gives it to him, and he is finally victorious

(10:05):
in his fight against the mouse King, cutting off the
mouse king seven heads and presenting Marie with seven little crowns.
The Nutcracker takes Marie to a magical kingdom with meadows
made of candy, a lemonade river, and towns made of
gingerbread and bonbonds. She soon learns that the Nutcracker is

(10:26):
the Prince of Comfeturemborg, or the Kingdom of Sweets. Marie
once again wakes up in her own bed, and when
she tries to tell her family what has happened. They
are dismissive, but soon her godfather, Drosselmeyer's young nephew arrives
from Nuremberg. The nephew thanks Marie for saving him, and
he proposes. A year and a day later, Marie and

(10:48):
the younger Drosselmeyer Mary and from there reign as King
and Queen of the Kingdom of Sweets. This whole story
is twisting and layered. It folds back on itself at
various points. Marie often tells her parents what she's experienced
and seen, only for them to blame her fevered mind

(11:09):
and order her to stop telling such wild tales. As
her godfather Drosselmeyer tells her this story, he also suggests
that it's real, but then when he talks to her parents,
he dismisses what she's saying as fancy. As one example,
he tells her parents that the mouse King's seven crowns
are a gift that he gave her years before, certainly

(11:30):
not something belonging to a seven headed mouse king. Gaslighting.
The book's tone is fairly ominous, actually, and it draws
heavily from German romanticism. The brothers grim and they're dark
and sometimes gruesome. Collections of fairy tales date from around
this same time. Past podcast subject Casper David Friedrich was

(11:51):
another of Hoffman's contemporaries, and many of his landscapes have
a similarly eerie and foreboding, although still very beautif full feel.
But in eighteen forty four, more than twenty years after
Eta Hoffman's death, past podcast subject Alexandra dum Peir adapted
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and translated it into French.

(12:14):
The resulting book had the same basic plot and the
same sort of story within a story, but with a
tone that was generally a lot lighter and more cheerful
than the original. And it is this version that was
adapted into a ballet, or at least part of it was.
We're going to talk more about that after a sponsor break.

(12:42):
Pyotr Ilyitchchaikovsky was born in Russia in eighteen forty and
he started composing music by the age of four and
taking piano lessons at five. But Russia didn't have a
formal system of education for musicians and composers yet, so
it did not occur to his parents at first that
this could be a care for him, so they focused

(13:02):
his education on the idea that he would become a
civil servant that eventually changed, though. He became one of
the first students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory after it
was established in eighteen sixty two, and he eventually became
famous both within and outside of Russia, composing seven symphonies,
eleven operas and various concertos, cantatas, quartets, choral works, and

(13:27):
three ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.
And The Nutcracker Ballet was part of a two part
commission from Russia's Imperial Theaters in Saint Petersburg, the other
part being a one act opera. The ballet was his
second collaboration to include both Imperial Theaters director Ivan Vasevlovski
and French choreographer Marius Petipa, chief choreographer of the Imperial Ballet.

(13:52):
The three men had previously worked together on The Sleeping Beauty,
with Zevlovski commissioning the work, writing the libretto and being
heavily involved in the costume and set design, and Peteba
choreographing the ballet and providing detailed instructions to Chukowski on
the music. The Sleeping Beauty had been a success after
opening at the Marinski Theater in Saint Petersburg in eighteen ninety,

(14:15):
and Vesblovsky was hoping for something similar to happen with
The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King had become
a well known and widely read children's story, and he
chose Alexander Duma's adaptation of it as the ballet's starting point.
Even though classical ballet does not typically include spoken language

(14:35):
or narration, by the nineteenth century, the process of creating
a ballet generally started still with a libretto, a written
narrative laying out the story that the ballet would tell.
The composer, choreographer, set designer, and costume designer. Basically everyone
who worked on creating the ballet would rely on this
libretto to translate the story for the stage. The Nutcracker's

(14:58):
libretto is generally credited to both Zevalewski and Petipa, although
it was not entirely clear who did what in preparing it.
But the Nutcracker collaboration among these men did not seem
to have gone as well as it did with The
Sleeping Beauty. With both ballets, Petipa provided Chikovsky with detailed

(15:19):
instructions about the type of music that was needed, as
in the full ballet was broken down into its scenes
and dances and variations, with Petipah giving very precise instructions
about how many measures of what kind of music was
needed for each of them. It reads almost like a
shopping list. But in The Sleeping Beauty these notes and

(15:41):
the libretto they had added up to a story that
had deeper themes, which Daikovsky could explore through musical devices
like lip botifs. These represented aspects of the story while
also unifying the ballet. In addition to the story of
Princess Aurora, The Sleeping Beauty also dealt with themes of
good versus evil, and Tchaikowsky could just explore all of

(16:04):
this and represent it through music. Meanwhile, the libretto for
The Nutcracker had abandoned the deeper themes and ambiguities of
Hoffmann's story. The entire middle portion of The Nutcracker and
the Mouse King had been cut almost entirely, leaving only
the Christmas party, Drosalmeyer bringing gifts, the battle between the

(16:24):
Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and the voyage to the
Kingdom of Sweets after a grand final walt The Nutcracker
was to end with an apotheosis with a bee hive
surrounded by bees. The main character, now named Clara, did
not return home after her travels through the Kingdom of Sweets,
so it really wasn't even clear what the point of

(16:45):
it all was. On top of his creative dissatisfaction, Tchikowsky
experienced depression and anxiety throughout his life, along with social
pressures and taboos stemming from his attraction to other men
at a time when homosexuality was both ill legal and
deeply stigmatized, and all of this may have fed into
his struggle to get started on The Nutcracker. In April

(17:08):
of eighteen ninety one, he wrote to Zevlovsky about it, saying,
quote here in Ruon, I had to call on extraordinary
willpower to make an agonizing effort in order to work.
As a result, what comes out is colorless, dry, hasty,
and wretched. The awareness that things are not going well

(17:29):
torments me and agonizes me to the point of sickness.
A consuming depression constantly gnaws at my heart, and I
have not for a long time felt as unhappy as now.
The day after Tchikovsky wrote this letter, he learned by
reading it in a newspaper that his sister Alexandra had died.

(17:50):
He was, at that moment on the way to board
a ship for a tour of the United States, where
he would, among other things, conduct music he had composed
at the grand open of Carnegie Hall. This would have
been terrible in any circumstance, but this was particularly terrible timing.
But Tchikowski did not cancel his tour or his appearances
in the United States. Instead, it seems as though he

(18:14):
took this transatlantic voyage as a time to contemplate and
to refocus. Music. Historians and theorists have noted that The
Nutcracker incorporates more borrowed folk melodies and existing musical themes
than most of his other work does, kind of suggesting
that once he did finally get under way, he still
had trouble feeling creative. There's also some suggestion that the

(18:37):
character of the Sugarplum Theory is meant to embody his
late sister. He was known to the family as Sasha
Dchaikowski may not have been the only person who was
facing very real creative trouble with the Nutcracker. Although Marius
Petipah had been the one to write Chaikovsky's instructions for
the music and initial notations for the choreography, he did

(18:58):
not choreograph most of the ballots. He became ill shortly
after that work began, and he left most of it
to his assistant Lev Ivanov. According to Petipa's memoirs, Ivanov
did all the staging and choreographed all the dances. Pettipa
was seventy three when this happened, but there is some
speculation that he really wasn't all that sick and he

(19:19):
just kind of didn't want to work on this nonsensical show.
Ivanov worked from Petipa's notes, but he didn't always follow them.
For example, in Act two, Petipah called for quote Treypak
for the end of the dance turning on the floor.
Trey Pak is a folk dance from Ukraine and Russia,
but Ivanov took this piece in a totally different direction,

(19:43):
using hoops and lead dancer Alexander Shuriev choreographed his part himself.
This is why in some productions of The Nutcracker day
Treypak is this intensely athletic dance full of leaping and squatting,
and dancers that are dressed as like peasants or maybe
cossacks will and others they are in candy stripes and
dancing with hoops. If you've only seen the first version,

(20:06):
the first time you've seen the second one, you might
feel like it was a rip off. Yeah. Jakowski compiled
a Nutcracker suite featuring selections from the ballet, which was
first performed in March of eighteen ninety two, and the
full ballet premiered at the Mariinski Theater in Saint Petersburg, Russia,

(20:26):
on December eighteenth of that year or December sixth under
the old style calendar. It followed Chaikovski's one act opera Yolanta,
which had also been the other part of this commission.
One of the criticisms of Daikowsky's work during his lifetime
was that it was not Russian enough. But The Nutcracker
includes several elements that are really hallmarks of this period

(20:48):
of Russian theater and ballet. This is really considered to
be Russian ballet's golden age. Czar Alexander the third was
a patron of the arts in the theater and a
lot of the work it was created during his reign
involved dramatic sets and costumes and the sorts of spectacles
that the czar generally enjoyed. Much of the second act

(21:10):
of The Nutcracker is also essentially a court celebration, with
Clara as a guest to the Kingdom of sweets being
presented with a pageant of all of the Kingdom's best
and brightest, and some of this court review highlights Russia
in its presentation, especially the series of Spanish, Chinese, Arabian
and Russian dances also known as Chocolate Tea Coffee Tripak.

(21:33):
Especially in Petipa's original notations, Trippak was to be the showstopper,
suggesting that Russia was the best among nations. These dances
combine with others in Act two to suggest the idea
of many nations living together harmoniously under the rule of
one benevolent monarch, that is the Sugarplum Fairy, along with

(21:53):
her prints. A twenty sixteen article in the journal Dance
Research by Damien Maye also explores the idea that the
use of French songs and costumes inspired by fashion of
the French Revolutionary era allude to the alliance between France
and Russia that developed in the eighteen nineties, and Tzar
Alexander the third does seem to have liked this ballet.

(22:16):
Djaikowsky wrote a letter to his brother saying that the
Czar quote was delighted and sent for me to his
box and said a whole lot of kind words. I
love that, a whole lot of kind words. It's just
a great turn of phrase. But as for everybody else,
reviews a little bit mixed, and the bad reviews were
often explicitly and pointedly bad. People pointed out the same

(22:41):
aspects of the libretto that had caused Chaikowsky so much frustration,
including the fact that Act one and Act two almost
felt like two totally different ballets, neither of which made
a whole lot of sense. Some critics insisted that Act
one was barely a ballet at all. People mostly stood
around and pantomimed the words of one critic quote. First

(23:02):
of all, the Nutcracker can under no condition be called
a ballet. It does not satisfy even one of the
demands of a ballet. Ballet, as a basic genre of art,
is mimed drama, and consequently must contain all the elements
of norm drama. On the other hand, there must be
a place in ballet for plastic attitudes and dances made

(23:23):
up of the entire essence of classical choreography. There is
nothing of this in The Nutcracker. There is not even
a subject. And also the stage was full of children.
At this point in Russian ballet history, younger ballet students
did not usually share the stage with older teens and adults.
Reviewers bemoaned the fact that this ballet seemed to have

(23:45):
been made by children for children. To add to that,
many of the boys in it were not dance students
at all. They had been recruited from a military academy.
The focus on children in the ballets first act also
meant that the most riching balletic performances done by the
company's most prominent dancers didn't happen until very late in

(24:07):
the evening in act too, and because the Nutcracker followed
this other one act opera, that meant that they got
on stage very very late. People felt like they had
watched a whole opera and then a bunch of kids
running around for an hour before the real ballet even started.
And then that ballet was over with no real resolution. Overall,

(24:27):
though Tchaikowski's score was praised, although sometimes that praise was
a little bit backhanded, as in quote in some it's
a pity that so much good music is expended on
such nonsense, so unworthy of attention, But the music in
general is excellent. Dchaikowski clearly had huge trouble getting started
and found the early work on the ballet incredibly difficult,

(24:50):
but it does seem that he was pleased enough with
the score once he was actually done with it. One
thing to note here is that we don't actually have
the choreography from the nutcra debut performances. Petipi's instructions to
Chaikovsky have survived, along with his notes and the libretto,
but the oldest surviving set of more complete, comprehensive notes

(25:12):
was not written down until a few years later, so
it's not really clear whether any of the criticisms of
the dancing itself led the choreography to evolve over the
Marinski Theaters eighteen ninety two to ninety three ballet season
once that season was over, though it does not appear
that major changes were made to the Nutcracker until after

(25:32):
the Russian Revolution. While the ballet's reception was mixed to poor,
its music became far more popular, particularly the Nutcracker Suite.
Orchestras in Europe and North America started performing the Nutcracker
Suite in the early to mid eighteen nineties, and it
became widely recognizable on both sides of the Atlantic. It
wasn't until decades later that the Nutcracker became a winter

(25:56):
holiday tradition, though you will talk more about that. After
a spomp break after the eighteen ninety two to eighteen
ninety three ballet season, the Nutcracker only made spotty appearances

(26:16):
on Russian stages for a while. Sometimes companies performed only
the second act or a selection of highlights. The ballet
was revived in nineteen oh nine, and in nineteen nineteen
Alexander Gorsky staged a version that combined the character of
Clara with the sugar Plum Ferry for the first time.
Vasili Vainonen introduced new choreography in nineteen thirty four, also

(26:40):
casting adult dancers and what had originally been children's rolls.
But overall the Nutcrackers appearances on Russian and then Soviet
stages it was pretty spotty. Although the narrative takes place
at Christmas, it also was not a Christmas standard. Easter
is really the more important and festive holiday in the
Eastern Orthodox Church. The Soviet Union also banned Christmas celebrations

(27:04):
in the late nineteen twenties, leading to the rise of
New Years as a secular holiday. The Nutcracker was performed
outside of Russia and the Soviet Union for the first
time in nineteen thirty four. That was in London, based
on choreographic notes by Nicholas Serjeyev, who had been the
company manager of the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg. When

(27:26):
he left Russia in nineteen eighteen. He had taken the
choreography for more than twenty ballets with him. They had
been recorded using a dance notation method that had been
developed by Vladimir Ivanovitch Stepanov. In nineteen forty, the ballet
Rue de Monte Carlo presented selections from The Nutcracker while
on tour in the US. Then Disney's Fantasia debut in

(27:50):
theaters on November thirteenth of nineteen forty. This film was
not a financial success, in part because World War II
shut down movie theaters in Europe, but it is credited
with popularizing classical music in the United States, including selections
from the Nutcracker Suite. Some of the Nutcracker pieces in
Fantasia include the Dance of the sugar Plump Fairy, during

(28:13):
which fairies flitter about, opening flowers and sending dewdrops down spiderwebs.
Mushrooms twirl around during the Chinese dance. There are long
tailed fish that gracefully swim around in coffee, and thistles
that very energetically dance during trepak. Although neither the fish

(28:34):
nor the mushrooms are human, they both retain some of
the exoticized stereotype depictions that are often part of the
Nutcracker ballet. During the Chinese and Arabian dances, the mushrooms,
for example, have slanted eyes and a posture that suggests
they're wearing robes, and the fish's movement and sensual demeanor
suggests a harem. Fantasia has a content warning when viewed

(28:58):
on Disney Plus Today know voting that it quote includes
negative depictions and or mistreatment of people or cultures, although
that's usually interpreted as referencing centaurs who appear in the
pastoral Symphony, some of which have been cut out of
the current version of the film. When introducing the Nutcracker
Sweet portion of Fantasia, narrator Deems Taylor explains that the

(29:21):
Nutcracker Sweet is part of a ballet that wasn't much
of a success and quote nobody performs it nowadays. That
was more or less true in nineteen forty, but today
that sentence is hilarious. Four years after Fantasia, the San
Francisco Ballet staged the first US performance of the full

(29:43):
Nutcracker Ballet. The Ballet's founder and choreographer William Christiansen's talked
through ideas for it with choreographer George Balanschein and Alexandra
Danilova of Ballet Russ. Christiansen had never actually seen the
full Nutcracker Ballet and later that these conversations, and particularly
Balanchine's insights, had a huge influence on the San Francisco production. Then,

(30:08):
in nineteen fifty four, The Nutcracker opened at the New
York City Ballet with choreography by co founder George Balanchine,
whose name has been anglicized from George Balanshivadza. He was
born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in nineteen oh four, and
he had studied at the Imperial School of Ballet and
the Marionski Theater. He appeared in productions of The Nutcracker

(30:29):
before the Russian Revolution, which means that he learned and
observed choreography that had started with Petepah and Ivanov back
in the nineteenth century. He also learned other versions by
other choreographers before leaving Russia in nineteen twenty four. Lincoln
Kirstein invited Ballanchin to the US in nineteen thirty three
to establish the School of American Ballet and the American

(30:51):
Ballet Company. Kirstein and Balanchin went on to establish the
New York City Ballet in nineteen forty eight. In the
New York City Ballets nineteen fifty four, Nutcracker passed podcast
subject Maria Tallchief, danced the part of the Sugarplum Ferry.
Tall Chief was a citizen of Osage Nation and is
regarded as the first prima ballerina in the United States.

(31:12):
In this version, the young protagonist's name is Marie rather
than Clara and Marie. The Nutcracker prints and other roles
in this first and were danced by almost forty children
from the School of American Ballet. This production was also
one in which Trey Pak features dancers dressed in candy
stripes dancing with hoops. Although Balanchine's Nutcracker first opened on

(31:34):
February second of nineteen fifty four, it quickly became the
heart of a special holiday ballet season, and the New
York City Ballet has performed it every year since then.
A lot of what made The Nutcracker so reviled in
Russia in eighteen ninety two had nearly the opposite effect
in the United States in nineteen fifty four. It was

(31:54):
still not a show that made a lot of sense
from a plot standpoint, but it captured a sense of
childlike holiday wonder. The audience response was less oh, what
are these children doing here? This is ballet, and more, Oh,
look at those kids, they're adorable. This is wholesome family entertainment.
Even without a logical plot to follow, the Nutcrackers seemed
to celebrate values like home and family and holiday cheer,

(32:18):
and that was not an accident. Balanchine and the rest
of the creative team at the New York City Ballet
had understood that their company desperately needed something that could
have mass appeal, and the Nutcracker wound up suiting that
need extremely well. And even though this was happening during
the Cold War, when the United States was deeply and

(32:39):
increasingly distrustful of the Soviet Union, which makes it seem
real weird that people would get so excited about a
Russian ballet, ballet was actually something of an exception. One
of the many, many ways that the US and the
USSR maintained a rivalry and competed with each other during
the Cold War was through dance and ballet, Specifically, an

(33:01):
abridged version of the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker aired
on CBS in nineteen fifty seven, and then a somewhat
more complete version aired the following year in nineteen fifty eight,
with Balanchine in the role of Drosselmeyer. In the nineteen
fifty eight version, June Lockhart, who had recently replaced Chloris
Leachman as Timmy's adoptive mother on the TV show Lassie,

(33:22):
provides an opening introduction in which she says, quote, Christmas
Day isn't Christmas without a real old fashioned story of
magic and miracles. Two televised ballets two years in a
row established the Nutcracker as an invented tradition that reminds
me a little bit of the Yes Virginia story that

(33:45):
had a similar trajectory. So Valentine's Nutcracker was huge for
the New York City Ballet and for ballet as a whole.
As its popularity spread, it became the production that ballet
companies used to help fund the rest of the season,
sometimes getting about half of the year's ticket revenue just
from the Nutcracker. That, of course, is a blessing and

(34:08):
a curse. One widely repeated quote that's often attributed to
dance critic Richard Buckle is that each Christmas quote, we
are all one nutcracker closer to death. For much of
its history, before this point, ballet had typically been performed
on grand stages and before royal courts, and while the

(34:29):
Nutcracker is certainly still performed among elite dance companies on
prestigious stages, it's also found a home in places like
elementary schools and youth centers. It has spurred on the
popularity of ballet as an art form. The popularity of
the Nutcracker also goes beyond ballet. It's one of the
reasons why decorative nutcrackers ultimately spread beyond Germany, especially as

(34:54):
holiday decorations. In nineteen sixty one, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy
chose nutcracker ballet themed decorations for a Christmas tree in
the Blue Room at the White House, and that established
the tradition to have a themed Christmas tree at the
presidential residence. Sadly, the people who were most involved in
the original creation of the nutcracker did not live to

(35:16):
see this success and influence. Lev Ivanov died in nineteen
oh one at the age of sixty seven. Ivan Vezevlovski
died in nineteen oh nine at the age of seventy four,
and Marius Petipah died in nineteen ten. He was ninety
two at that point. All three of them outlived Pyotr Ilietzchikovsky,
who died on November sixth, eighteen ninety three, or October

(35:38):
twenty fifth in the old style calendar. His cause of
death at the time was reported as cholera, but there
is also speculation that he took his own life, and
that this may have been connected to a matter of
honor related to his sexual orientation. He was only fifty
three at the time, and the Nutcracker was his last ballet.
One of the things that we've touched on a little

(35:59):
bit is the parts of the Nutcracker often involve racist stereotypes,
especially the national dances of Spanish or chocolate, Arabian or coffee,
Chinese or tea, and Russian or Traypack. Traypack, of course,
was meant to be a reflection of Russian ideals, including
bravery and physical and military prowess, especially in its original

(36:21):
conception as a folk dance. Although the music for the
Arabian dance is adapted from a Georgian lullaby, it and
the Spanish, Arabian and Chinese dances have historically all used
musical elements and costumes and choreography to suggest some racial
and ethnic stereotypes. How or whether ballet companies staging The

(36:41):
Nutcracker have dealt with this in more recent years is
really all over the place, from making zero changes to
re envisioning those pieces in a completely different direction, to
hiring dancers from places like China and the Middle East
to re choreograph those pieces in a more authentic way.
Has also proved itself to be almost infinitely adaptable. At

(37:04):
this point, there are multiple film and TV versions, along
with prequel sequels and reimaginings. Although many stage productions are
based on Balanchine's choreography or on other choreography that has
its roots in the work of Petebah and Ivanov, there
are so many others who are going to list just
a few examples. In the nineteen eighties, the Pacific Northwest

(37:27):
Ballet and choreographer Kent Stoll wanted to return to the
spirit of Eta Hoffman's original story. To that end, they
brought in Maurice Sendak to design the sets and write
the libretto for a new staging of The Nutcracker. This
became the Pacific Northwest Ballet's version of The Nutcracker for
about three decades, and it was released as a film

(37:47):
in nineteen eighty six. They also published a translation of
Eta Hoffmann's story as a book that was translated by
Ralph Mannheim and accompanied by Sendak's illustrations. A version called
nut debuted in Brussels in nineteen ninety one, and it
uses Dchaukowski's score and is based on the Eta Hoffman story,

(38:08):
but it is a satiric comedy with choreography by Mark
Morris and a production designed based on the work of
illustrator and cartoonist Charles Burns. Harlem Nutcracker debuted in nineteen
ninety six, choreographed by Donald Byrd and working off of
Duke Ellington and Billy Streehorn's arrangement of the Nutcracker suite

(38:28):
and in this ballet, Clara is a widowed grandmother facing
her first Christmas without her late husband. Debbie Allen Dance
Academy's Hot Chocolate Nutcracker incorporates all kinds of different music
and dance styles, with the rats narrating the story. Parts
of this are shown in the twenty twenty documentary Dance
Dreams Hot Chocolate Nutcracker. And then there are also just

(38:50):
smaller special touches that ballet companies around the world have
used to ground their productions of the Nutcracker in a
particular time and place, and that includes in its home
of Russia, Moscow. Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker includes a giant
Matrushka doll and Russian folk figures like dead Morotz and Snagrushka.
This ballet's heroine is known as Masha, which is a

(39:13):
Russian derivative of the name Marie own Nutcracker. We'll talk
about some more Nutcracker stuff in the behind the scenes
because it's so much I have experience as an audience
member and you have experience as a dancer. Yep, thanks

(39:34):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd
like to send us a note, our email address is
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
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