The Nutcracker

A Christmas story that began as a German tale, became a French one, and turned into a Russian ballet.

From tale to ballet

In 1816 the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann published The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, a strange, dreamlike story about a girl named Marie, her godfather Drosselmeyer and a nutcracker who is really an enchanted young man. Alexandre Dumas retold it in French, and that gentler version became the ballet.

The Nutcracker ballet opened at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in December 1892, with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and dances by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. It wasn't an instant hit. Today it is danced every Christmas all over the world, and the heroine is usually called Clara.

A new sound

For the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Tchaikovsky used an instrument he had found in Paris the year before: the celesta, a small keyboard that strikes metal plates and sounds like tiny bells. The chime you hear when you find a word is a nod to it.

The dances of the Land of Sweets

In the second act, sweets from around the world dance for Clara and the prince: chocolate (a Spanish dance), coffee (an Arabian dance), tea (a Chinese dance), a Russian trepak often danced with candy canes, marzipan shepherdesses, Mother Ginger and the children who hide under her skirt, and finally the Waltz of the Flowers.

Sources

The music

The tune you hear is the opening of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, played by a little celesta-like synthesiser in your browser, with plucked notes underneath like the ballet's pizzicato strings. The notes were read from a public-domain 1918 edition, E. Langer's piano-duet arrangement published by G. Schirmer and held on Wikimedia Commons.

• Wikipedia: The Nutcracker
• Wikipedia: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

The story is in the public domain. The retellings in this game are new.