The holiday season is everyone’s chance to see the full, evening-length ballet, The Nutcracker. Many major cities offer a professional production of it, but even smaller cities and towns may present some version of it. The reason of course is that from its narrative to its very-recognizable music, it has the effect of giving people that Christmas spirit.

This extremely well-known Tchaikovsky ballet premièred at the Mariinsky Theatre on Sunday, December 18, 1892 (on a double-bill with Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera Iolanta.) While not initially popular as a ballet, its score was enormously praised and was an immediate success as an orchestral suite of its best sections. It stood on its own as the Nutcracker Suite. This always refers to the concert, not  the ballet.

The Nutcracker ballet was a collaboration of many minds. Based on the Hoffmann story, the idea of a ballet libretto was put forth by the director of the Russian Imperial Theatres, one Ivan Vsevolozhsky. The director brought Pyotr Tchaikovsky on board for the musical score, promising him that master choreographer Marius Petipa would also be working on the production. Vsevolozhsky hoped it would live up to the extraordinary success of The Sleeping Beauty ballet on which all of them had also collaborated.

In the end, Petipa’s health was not good and he was forced to step aside in favor of the assistant ballet master, Lev Ivanov. Petipa did not keep out of its creation entirely however, and had Ivanov base all of the dancing on his own notes and original vision. As was usual, Director Vsevolozhsky took responsibility for the set and costume designs.

For readers of Fate, none of this production work is as important as what was going on during the première itself. That night proved a difficult time for the composer, a turning point in his realization that he had a very difficult problem on his hands. (Without giving anything away, let me just say that it was nerve wracking for me to write and affected me greatly. I can never think of The Nutcracker in the same way again.) That section of my story is clearly “the beginning of the end” for Tchaikovsky.

So why am I mentioning a Christmas ballet before it’s even Thanksgiving? Because if you don’t get a ticket soon, it could sell out!  Why not take a moment to look up productions in your area and treat your loved ones to a very famous holiday tradition.

Happy reading, Adin Dalton

Cast of The Nutcracker

Vsevolozhsky’s costume for Nutcracker