Popular for 127 years…
It was composed in 1892, only a year before Tchaikovsky’s death. I did not know that, and I’m surprised to find out that it was one of the last things he wrote.
There are two different versions…
It’s a ballet, and in that form it takes well over an hour. Call that the long versions. Then there is the suite, and that’s the form we mostly hear today. It’s a bit more than 20 minutes long. Finally there is an extended version which attempts to get all the music in the complete ballet, but this was, as far as I can tell, something that Tchaikovsky never planned, and there is no official “complete version” except for the ballet itself.
Rostropovich/Berlin Philharmonic
There are about a gazillion recordings, so this is just one. I would be very interested if anyone has a favorite recording. Each is a bit different, so the sound can be varied as well as the interpretation. The tempos are bit different, the concept varied, and so on. Tchaikovsky’s suite, the Nutcracker Suite, was immediately loved by audiences and has never faded in popularity.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin/Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest
It took a couple days to find this. He now conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra, which I hear on Monday nights driving home from work. It’s nice to hear all the music, not just what Tchaikovsky put in his Nutcracker Suite.
The ballet, as the composer intended us to enjoy his conception…
Generally it seems to be around an hour and 30 minutes long, I’m quite obviously not a dancer, and I know very little about ballet except that a bunch of incredibly talented musical athletes do a bunch of things that look physically impossible to me.
If you manage to watch all the way through this famous version with Mikhail Baryshnikov, I can tell you that most of the really familiar music happens in Act II, and that’s where the really famous dances happen too.
This was made in 1977, and it’s famous. I watched the whole thing and found it very enjoyable.
Although it says it was a “movie”, it looks to me like a TV movie, and in that time (1977) the quality of things made for TV were visually inferior to what we see today. Then there is the matter of making it “adult”. That was probably better for the dancing, so if you are a ballet buff, you probably prefer this version. But since this is now a Christmas special, I like the kids better, even if they don’t dance as well.
Now, the rest of the story…
It came from a German…
Nussknacker und Mausekönig/The Nutcracker and the Mouse King was written in 1816. The story is long and complicated, but to me the most interesting thing is that Tchaikovsky used an adaptation the author’s story based on an a Alexandre Dumas translation. Dumas is famous for Le Comte de Monte-Cristo/ The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires/ The Three Muskateers. How and why did he come to translate a German story into French? And how did he master German well enough to do that? I don’t know.
There is a strange relationship between Russia and France in ballet…
It was very common for Russians in the past to speak French, and even into the 20th century many Russians learned French before English. Baryshnikov is said to have communicated mostly in French when he first defected, and he learned English later. The whole story is very complicated.
The critics were, as usual wrong…
But this time it may not have been entirely their fault, because the problems was not the music, which connected instantly with audiences. The problem was the ballet itself, and there were several complaints.
The story was criticized as “lopsided”…
Apparently the ballerina did not dance to until nearly the end of Act I, and the ballerina in ballet is a bit like the “fat lady” in opera. So they wanted the stars, including the male lead, to dance more and earlier.
Then some did not like the abrupt change from the real world, which is the subject of most of the first act, and the fantasy world of the second.
They tried to use children as the dancers…
It was considered a mistake, and that idea was later dumped. Today we more often see adults dancing the rules, but quite obviously other versions at Christmas time with many children is very popular, so it would seem that Tchaikovsky’s original intentions were just fine. History, as usual, ends up making fun of the failure of critics, not the creators.
Recast for adults…
In Russia a new version of the work in 1919 cast adult dancers in the roles of Clara and the Prince, rather than children. This introduced a love story into the tale and gave adult dancers portraying Clara and the Prince a lot bigger opportunity to push the story forward. And yet it also works great today with kids, so maybe the young dancers are better today than those a couple centuries. Or maybe the choreography just got better. Who knows!
Walt Disney helped further popularize the music…
Walt Disney used some of the music in Fantasia in 1940, which led to a greater interest in the ballet. Some of the animation to The Nutcracker remains famous today.
The first US complete performance…
The ballet’s first complete United States performance was in 1944, and this is especially interesting because it was four years after Fantasia. In other words, apparently Disney helped popularize The Nutcracker.
George Balanchine and The Nutcracker…
In 1954 George Balanchine’s staged The Nutcracker, and from there the tradition of performing the complete ballet at Christmas eventually spread to the rest of the United States, and today seeing it at this time of year is an established tradition. Children all around the world dream of performing in this Tchaikovsky all-time Russian hit.
TV continued to help even more…
Interest grew when George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker was televised in the late 1950s, which lead to Baryshnikov’s famous movie in 1977, and the rest is history, including a restoration of Tchaikovsky’s original idea of making children central not only the story but to the stage presentation of the whole thing.
I loved the oboe.
I think the one with the adults made it look professional. It also looks better
I liked the one with children the best because it seemed happier. I also liked that the director was a lady.
Although I preferred the adult version, children would probably relate better to the first one. The endings were quite different. In the children’s performance, the ending followed…and they lived happily ever after. The adult version left you wondering what was to follow.
Listening to the suite gives you the opportunity to hear the music without visual distractions, however, I liked the effects in Disney’s version. Very enjoyable.
I liked the one with the adults better.
I like the one with the children best, because it feels more magical and fairy tale-ish. I wonder how it comes across if it is purely on stage, live, seen as an audience member. There won’t be any cameras doing close-ups. The children can’t dance as impressively as adults, but that they dance so well at all at those ages is cool to see.