An Entertainment of Genius (part two)

Rather than a fairy story, then, this turns out to be a mysterious Romantic Novelle, and one charged with Hoffmann’s complicated layering of fantasy and reality. This extends from the fictional framing of the story, as told by one part of Hoffmann (while he simultaneously appears in it as Drosselmeyer, who is also one of the figures in the model castle and who frightens Marie by transforming himself into the owl clock), to the uncertainty as to whether Marie has really dreamt the battle and to how Drosselmeyer knows about it, and then to the tale-within-a-tale of Princess Pirlipat and the Nutcracker. There is further uncertainty as to whether the tale is meant for children or not. Theodor, another of the Serapionsbrüder, points out that the threads are difficult to follow; there are philosophical asides; the Nutcracker first addresses his troops in tones parodying Frederick the Great ('Kein Hund von Trompeter regt und rührt sich!'), then at the height of the battle exclaiming, in a Shakespearian allusion few German children would have got in 1816, 'A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse'. Hoffmann, in short, is pretending to write a children’s story, but he is using it to disturb, in a manner fashioned with greater sophistication than any of the stories being collected by the Grimm Brothers in these years, by suggesting that innocent events can be invaded by peculiar and even sinister meaning, that reality and the imagination, the natural and the supernatural, are constantly intermingling in ways beyond our control.

Almost all this is watered down to make it acceptable to the conventions of ballet-féerie as perceived by Marius Petipa. The most gifted of the French choreographers who worked in 19th-century Russia, he did much to follow Perrot and Didelot in moving ballet away from the divertissements which were a popular aristocratic diversion, and to unify dance, drama, décor and music, but his style was essentially pretty. The first part of the plot survives more or less intact in outline, and various allusions give clues to the ballet treatment, such as mention of pine forests and an emphasis on eating, particularly on confectionery; but the tale's unnerving eccentricity survives only marginally in the figure of Drosselmeyer. The battle no longer arises from Marie's inner adolescent troublings but becomes an amusing stage diversion, while the second part of the ballet is merely an excuse for a full-scale divertissement. Hoffmann's Marie is rendered by her experiences a dreamy, introspective girl, roused from her reveries by the Nutcracker, who has become Drosselmeyer's nephew: he bears her off to be his bride in Marzipanschloss. Clara, in the ballet, is taken off to the Kingdom of Sweets, where after the pretty dances everyone does her honour for saving the Prince.

For all his doubts, Tchaikovsky set to work on planning the ballet 'with all my might', he told his brother Modest, so as to get it out of the way before leaving for a visit to America in March. Work was even continued during his journey to Berlin and on to Paris and Le Havre, where he lamented 'the absolute impossibility of depicting the Sugar Plum Fairy in music'. He felt his creative powers to be on the wane, complaining to his beloved nephew Bob Davydov that, 'if I become convinced that I can only set rechauffés at my musical banquet, then I shall certainly give up composing', adding a grisly account of his hair turning white and, like his teeth, falling out, his feet dragging, his eyes dimming, his other faculties failing. Whatever the melodrama in this account by a lifelong hypochondriac, it was true that he had aged: he was tiring more easily, and his friends thought him older than his 50 years.

Tchaikovsky did have one good card up his sleeve. As early as February he had decided to use children's instruments, and in Paris bought some which eventually found their way into the score of The Nutcracker. Better still, he told his publisher Pyotr Jürgenson,

'I have discovered a new orchestral instrument in Paris, something between a small piano and a Glockenspiel, with a divinely beautiful tone... The instrument is called the Celesta Mustel and costs Fr1200... Have it sent direct to Petersburg; but no-one there must know about it. I am afraid that Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov might hear of it and make use of the new effect before I can. I expect a colossal effect from this new instrument.'

Work on the ballet continued through 1891, though interruption came with a tour to Warsaw and Hamburg until, homesick, he cancelled the rest of it. Back home, he scored part of the now completed ballet to make a concert suite, and this he conducted in St Petersburg on 19 March 1892. The whole ballet was finally orchestrated on 4 April and given its first performance on 18 December.

Continue to part three of three