So Many ‘Nutcrackers,’ So Little Time

<First published online in the New York Times on November 18, 2007>

“WELL, we are one more ‘Nutcracker’ nearer death,” the British critic Richard Buckle wrote in 1972. You get the tone. Here is the true sophisticate (note the royal “we”), jaded to the core, but there is this unkillable ballet, this glut of sweetness, this inevitable part of the dancegoer’s Christmas routine. If you think “The Nutcracker” is all tinsel, sugar and infantile twee-ness, then that’s the tone you too should adopt at this time of year. In the United States, several stagings of “The Nutcracker” start on Thanksgiving weekend, and we won’t be out of this “Nutcracker” season until after the New Year.

One more “Nutcracker” nearer death, though? No classic ballet is less death-haunted than “The Nutcracker” (though tucked into its narrative is a little mouse-scale revenge tragedy). The danger of watching too many “Nutcrackers” — as opposed to too many “Swan Lakes” or “Romeo and Juliets” — is that they may bring you sooner not to death but to second childhood.

A first-rate “Nutcracker,” however, brings you back into first childhood. The experience may be all the more moving when you are an adult. I write as one who never saw any “Nutcracker,” or heard the complete score, until I was 21. Unlike almost every other ballet, “The Nutcracker” is a child’s-eye story.

The original tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Nutcracker and the King of Mice,” was part of a great 19th-century wave of children’s stories in which the adult world looks outsize and new experiences seem overwhelming. Part of this wave were the fairy stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the early chapters of “Jane Eyre” (1847) and “David Copperfield” (1849), all of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking-Glass” (1872), Tchaikovsky’s ballet of “The Nutcracker” (1892) and Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel” (1893).

The “Nutcracker” ballet takes us into the huge alarms that are part of a child’s view of the larger world and — better in this respect than Hoffmann’s original — into a child’s equally huge sense of wonder. The Christmas tree! An invasion of mice! A landscape transfigured by snow! And sweets, candy, confectionery: a cornucopia of delicacies as a route not to infantile obesity or tooth decay but to magically new tastes. We’re speaking of innocence here. And as the ballet continues, this innocence only grows.

The story of each “Nutcracker” production is different in some detail from the others, but the usual pattern goes like this:

The action onstage starts with a Christmas party for adults and children. Drosselmeyer, a man of mystery, arrives. He gives the little heroine, Clara (or Marie), a Nutcracker doll; when her brother Fritz breaks it, Drosselmeyer mends it. After the party Clara, who should be in bed, returns to the room to retrieve her Nutcracker but, at midnight, finds everything growing outsize, above all the Christmas tree.

She is caught amid a battle between mice and toy soldiers, in which her Nutcracker, now grown to her size, is a hero, and in which she helps him to kill the Mouse King. (So yes, there is death in “The Nutcracker,” but Tchaikovsky doesn’t makes it dark; instead he makes it the end of a nightmare.)

Now her Nutcracker is again transformed into a handsome young prince, and he escorts her to new marvels: first (at end of Act I) a realm of snow and then (Act II) a land of sweets. In the latter he introduces her to the resident deity, the Sugar Plum Fairy, at whose behest a kaleidoscope of different dances, representing different sweets and different foreign countries at the same time, is performed for the two heroic child visitors.

This story just isn’t for theatergoers who need to stay sophisticated. The most polished and experienced person in it is Drosselmeyer, the adult magician whose nephew has been stuck in the guise of a nutcracker, and he propels the story in Act I. (In Hoffmann’s tale Drosselmeyer helps to explain why the mice are seeking revenge and tells the tale of the Hard Nut.)

But Drosselmeyer has no place in Act II, when his nephew and our little-girl heroine arrive in the Kingdom of Sweets, this ballet’s version of Wonderland. The makers of the ballet seem to have been echoing the words of St. Mark’s Gospel: “Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”

Does it sound too much to liken the Kingdom of Sweets to paradise? It was with “The Nutcracker” in mind that W. H. Auden wrote an essay on “Ballet’s Present Eden.” He observed that ballet was singularly well equipped to create states of idyllic bliss.

The architects of the 1892 ballet were worldly men: Tchaikovsky, the composer; Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the Imperial Theaters; Marius Petipa, the balletmaster; and, when Petipa fell ill, Lev Ivanov, his deputy. “The Nutcracker” in 1892 came as half of a Tchaikovsky double bill; the other half was an 84-minute one-act opera, “Iolanta,” a story in which adult love cures the heroine’s blindness in ways that come close to the Freudian.

The innocence and the confectionery of “The Nutcracker” were very deliberate choices. Probably Tchaikovsky identified with Drosselmeyer; as his nephews and nieces later testified, he was good at bringing magic into the lives of children.

Tchaikovsky knew well how to overwhelm. He had the “1812” Overture behind him and in the coming year (his last) would compose the “Pathétique” Symphony. Although “The Nutcracker” begins with the strings playing high, hushed and bouncy, it proceeds to reach at least two of the most outsize effects in his entire output.

Yet, true to the child’s eye that is the clue to the ballet, he brings them off by reverting to the simplest means: a series of rising scales (four notes climbing, then two down, building upward in pitch, in volume and through a wide range of orchestral sound in an epic crescendo) for the music when the Christmas tree grows huge in Act I, and a series of falling scales (shaped into a slow, sublime cascade) for the music for the Sugar Plum Fairy’s adagio in Act II.

For either piece of music Petipa had asked for 48 bars, the first “fantastic music with a grandiose crescendo,” the second “an adagio intended to produce a colossal impression.” Tchaikovsky’s response to these requirements was, by setting the simplest musical device on a huge scale, his way of showing the dimensions of a child’s heart: not complex but vast.

His other main way of tapping childlike wonder in this score is his orchestration. Marvelously distinct throughout, it takes the listener through one special sound world after another. Tchaikovsky achieves this effect mostly with his feeling for combining the known instruments of the orchestra into new sonorities. When “The Waltz of the Snowflakes” starts, little triplet figures for flute and piccolo alternate with isolated violin notes. We know the instruments, but they’ve never been combined with this kind of delicacy and color before.

For the famous solo for the Sugar Plum Fairy, however, he imported a percussion instrument from Paris hitherto unknown in Russia: the celesta. This solo, which used to be a theme tune on British radio, was the first “Nutcracker” music I ever heard. I was perhaps 6; I can’t forget the rapture with which I used to listen to it. And today — after passing through an immensely sophisticated phase in my teens when I thought such “Nutcracker” highlights were trite — I follow it again with similar amazement. Listening, we’re in Eden, and spellbound.

Many works of theater art, going back to Greek tragedy, are about the loss of innocence. Today there are few directors who can face the innocence of fairy stories without adopting some wise-guy angle. Most new “Nutcracker” productions in the last 40 years have come up with concepts: Rudolf Nureyev’s sub-Freudian “Nutcracker” (1967) in which the child heroine grows up to become the Sugar Plum Fairy, and old Drosselmeyer becomes her youthfully virile Prince; Peter Wright’s 1984 version for the British Royal Ballet, which makes it into Drosselmeyer’s story; Mark Morris’s “Hard Nut” (1991), which jam-packs extra helpings of Hoffmann’s story into Act II and becomes a love story; and Matthew Bourne’s “Nutcracker!” (1992), in which the children were in an orphanage, governed by Dickensian caricatures.

The truth is that you can depart miles from Tchaikovsky’s intentions and still produce something musically revealing and dramatically enthralling. Here I refer you to none other than Walt Disney, who in “Fantasia” turned “The Nutcracker Suite” (the composer’s series of musical lollipops from the ballet) into visions that have nothing to do with Hoffmann or children or sweets. Disney simply took mushrooms, thistles and autumn leaves and showed them being touched by magic.

Though other parts of “Fantasia” are funnier or more beautifully drawn, these “Nutcracker” dances are where Disney’s choreographerlike feeling for setting imagery to music reaches its most brilliant. They reach a peak in “The Waltz of the Flowers” (one of the two most substantial numbers in Act II of the complete ballet), which here becomes a view of the seasons, with leaves dropping and gliding in autumn, milkweed pods releasing seeds, frost fairies skating as they turn a pond’s surface to ice, and snowflake fairies changing a landscape. Ordinary things become astounding, and the music becomes a celebration of change, of plenty, of the process of nature.

There is only one “Waltz of the Flowers,” and one “Nutcracker,” that surpasses this. New York is lucky in that since 1954 it has had an annual season of George Balanchine’s “Nutcracker,” a masterpiece of construction that repays endless viewings (I once watched it 13 times in two weeks, with increasing admiration) and in which such basic matters as the rise of the Christmas tree and the fall of snow are given their full due.

I love the way the stage space itself expands from one scene to the next and the way the story operates as an education in ballet. When the Nutcracker is first transformed into a prince, he holds a turned-out position (tendu side) that functions as a symbol: Thanks to ballet, he will now be Marie’s guide into worlds of fantasy and of pure form.

How should this two-act ballet end? Many stagings take us back to the child heroine’s home, like Dorothy returning from Oz. But that’s not what Tchaikovsky’s music has in mind. It returns, though with different instrumentation, to the melody from the start of Act II, when he first introduces the children to the Kingdom of Sweets: a tune that tenderly rotates, as if he were showing us some dream carousel.

At the end of the original 1892 staging, something occurred that has never been repeated in later “Nutcracker” productions. As the children left the Kingdom of Sweets, an apotheosis showed a hive surrounded by dancing bees (eight students from the Imperial Ballet School). It’s not hard to see what the makers of the ballet had in mind: a view of the perfectly ordered kingdom where honey is made. Were they thinking of Virgil’s Fourth Georgic, where the happy continuity of the hive stands in opposition to the tragic tale of the musician Orpheus? I suppose we will never now see a “Nutcracker” that ends with bees, but for at least one “Nutcracker” performance this Christmas, I plan to shut my eyes and imagine that miniature realm.