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Fantasy and Reality

01 December 2007

How a fairy story became the world's most popular Christmas treat

In 1816 the German novelist, composer, painter, conductor and architect Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann wrote and published the tale Nussknacker und Mausekönig ('Nutcracker and Mouse King') in a collection of short stories. Little did he know that his tale was destined to become the subject of the most popular ballet in the world.

Yet The Nutcracker, given its premiere in St Petersburg in 1892, was far from being a faithful translation of Hoffmann's work into dance; few of the dark elements in the text were retained in the ballet and the complexity of the plot was reduced to a minimum. Scholars impute what they consider to be a misinterpretation – if not a betrayal – of the original story to the fact that the ballet's scenario was not derived from the German story but from Alexandre Dumas père's French adaptation of it. The author of The Three Musketeers had heavily edited the fairytale, aiming at a younger readership than Hoffmann's; at the same time he had added some touches of refined French Romanticism that superseded Hoffmann’s German Gothic nuances.

Interestingly, the person responsible for choosing Dumas' adaptation was not the French-born ballet-master Marius Petipa (as George Balanchine stated) but Ivan Alexandrovich Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres from 1883 to 1889, who had a profound, almost fanatical interest in French culture.

Looking for a possible ballet subject, Vsevolozhsky had turned once more to French literature, from which he had previously derived the scenario of The Sleeping Beauty (1890), ignoring the vast popularity of Hoffmann's writings in Russia. Neither Petipa nor the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (who was particularly fond of the original tale) welcomed Vsevolozhsky's proposal and made several efforts to improve what the choreographer regarded as an unsatisfactory scenario.

Nowadays the story of The Nutcracker is credited to both Vsevolozhsky and Petipa, though dance historians have recently discovered that there are discrepancies between the finished scenario and the ballet-master's plans.

Detractors consider The Nutcracker's apparent lack of dramatic depth as its weakest trait. Without the intricacies of the overlapping narrative incidents of Hoffmann's original story (described by John Warrack in his article in this programme), the plot can be seen as merely a pretext for some nice dancing. Yet a detailed analysis of both the scenario and the score – the original choreography has survived only in part – reveals that there is more than dancing children, lifesize toys and fighting mice.

Unlike other classics of the period, such as The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake (1895) and Raymonda (1898), The Nutcracker is divided into just two acts, the structure typical of earlier French Romantic ballets. Such a division is not haphazard for the acts are carefully juxtaposed – as they are in La Sylphide (1832) and Giselle (1841) – to underline the differences between the real and the supernatural worlds.

French Romantic influence can be also detected in the construction of Act II: it is a divertissement or series of dances, corresponding to the white acts in Romantic ballets, characterised by pure dance independent of the narrative. This structure, at a time when Romantic ideas and models were fading rapidly, indicates the intentions of the ballet's creators.

The Nutcracker is the story of a young girl's escape from reality and of her journey – probably her last, as she is approaching maturity – into a realm of fantasy where her innermost fears and uncertainties are eventually dispelled. Saluted by some dance scholars as 'a symphony about childhood', The Nutcracker is everything but an indulgent, affectionate glance at the world of childhood, for fearful recollections of pre-adolescence are subtly hinted at. This is a fairytale for adults, written and staged by adults as a memento of their own adolescence; to be clear and immediately accessible, the story's metaphor could not be overwhelmed by the additional episodes that occur in the original tale. So what at first seems to be dramatic weakness is in fact a clever theatrical device.

Continue to part two

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