Christmas Without ‘Nutcracker’? Humbug!

By Shannon Hicks

It is hard to imagine Christmas without The Nutcracker Ballet. Large and small ballet companies across the country have presented The Nutcracker for nearly 50 years. There have been live ballet performances, filmed performances later aired on television, and even an IMAX film that offered the world’s largest presentation of Nutcracker was produced four years ago.

Jennifer Johnston’s ballet students have presented a program this season that offers a performance of the familiar story of Clara and her nutcracker along with the history of the story and the surprising idea that the original story –– like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind when it reached the big screen –– has been romanticized in its modern presentation.

Ms Johnston is the artistic director of Newtown Centre of Classical Ballet School and The Malenkee Ballet Repertoire Company. Her dancers performed Nutcracker Suite twice on December 7 as part the 18th Annual Newtown Holiday Festival and then offered a special performance of the program this week for students at Head O’ Meadow School.

Anyone who has ever gone beyond the silver screen version of Gone With the Wind, who has actually read the 1,000-plus page book, knows that Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler may have been a large part of the story but they were not Mrs Mitchell’s primary focus. Hollywood’s version is beautiful, but it does not look at the story the way Mrs Mitchell intended to have her readers to: Gone With the Wind was written as a gift for her husband, a history buff. The story is of the Civil War, the North vs the South, and a disappearing way of life.

As Ms Johnston pointed out during Malenkee Ballet Repertoire performances of The Nutcracker Suite, the German writer Ernest Theodore (Wilhelm) Amadeus Hoffmann wrote a story in 1816 called The Nutcracker and The King of The Mice. Mr Hoffmann never intended his story about children to be for childhood, as his words portrayed a bleak view of humanity.

There is no way E.T.A. Hoffmann had any idea what would become of his short story when he set pen (quill?) to paper nearly 2½ centuries ago. Mr Hoffmann was a trained lawyer, but he also loved writing and music, both as creator, composer, and critic.

 His Nutcracker short story was published along with other short stories he had written in compilations with names like Tales of Fantasy, Night Stories, and Elixir of the Devils. While one essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni established Mr Hoffmann as a serious critic, his original work was dismissed at the time as undisciplined, wild, and fantastic.

“His plot centered around Marie, a German girl who lived in a loveless home,” Ms Johnston offered during her narration of her company’s performance. “Clara, the name of the central character in The Nutcracker as we know it today, was actually the name of Marie’s favorite doll.”

The composer Peter Tchaikovsky was commissioned in 1891 by the St Petersburg Opera to write music for Mr Hoffmann’s story. The following year he premiered The Nutcracker Ballet Suite, an eight-part concert version of the ballet music. The score, said Ms Johnston, was an instant success. It was published before the ballet itself was premiered.

Marius Petipa, the first ballet master and choreographer of His Imperial Majesty the Tsar of Russia, presented Tchaikovsky with his choreography for the ballet. This may be where the modern version of Nutcracker began to take shape: Mr Petipa did not choreograph his story directly from Mr Hoffmann’s tale, instead choosing a version written by the French write Alexander Dumas Pere called The Nutcracker of Nuremberg, which was revised to contain a happier plot and ending than Hoffmann’s original tale.

The Nutcracker debuted on December 17, 1892, at Mariinsky Theatre –– still the home of The Kirov Ballet today –– to mixed reviews.

“Some worried that its lush orchestration made the ballet music unsuitable for dancing,” said Ms Johnston.

As Jennifer Fisher pointed out in an article that appeared in the December 13, 2003 issue of The New York Times (“The Ballet Russia Didn’t Want”), Nutcracker may have debuted in St Petersburg but it was never fully embraced.

“For the imperial ballet world,” wrote Ms Fisher, “as well as for the Soviets who followed, there were too many children in leading roles, the party scene wasn’t sophisticated enough, and the ballet’s abrupt shift into fantasy just didn’t make sense.” The ballet was not a hit in Europe, either.

We Americans did not have such “prejudices,” as Ms Fisher called them, and the ballet immigrated to the United States during World War II. San Francisco Ballet director William Christensen wrote to the Library of Congress for a copy of Tchaikovsky’s score, and the production was performed for the first time in North America by the San Francisco company in 1944.

Mr Christensen, said Ms Johnston, “collaborated with Kirov members Alexandra Danilova and George Balanchine for details that has been used in the former Soviet Union.”

When Mr Balanchine came to the United States in 1954, the Kirov-trained dancer, choreographer, and founder of the New York City Ballet created his own version of The Nutcracker. It was through his direct performance of various of various roles for the Kirov that Mr Balanchine based his particular interpretation of the ballet that American audiences have come to love.

“Dancers who performed in Nutcracker performances of years ago are now teaching roles to dancers who perform in them today, just like I learned from my mentor, Marsha Ismailoff Mark,” Ms Johnston said.

“Yet even though all these years have passed since its original conception, the essential spirit of Nutcracker has remained the same,” she continued. “It’s a story complete with a growing Christmas tree and visions of Nutcrackers, Mice, Snowflakes, Chinese Tea, Waltzing Snowflakes, and a Sugar Plum Fairy.”

Nutcracker Ballet may vary from Mr Hoffmann’s fairy tale, but “it’s a holiday tradition that gives much joy to its audiences,” says Ms Johnston.

Dancers who have studied in Newtown  – and just about everywhere else in the United States – have grown up wishing to have a part in the traditional holiday  ballet.

Christmas without Nutcracker? Bah!