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An Entertainment of Genius

01 December 2007

The story of the story of The Nutcracker

Early in 1891, Tchaikovsky was approached by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the gifted and energetic Director of the Imperial Theatres, with an idea for a double bill of an opera and a ballet.

A man of wide culture and intelligence, talented as an artist and a playwright, Vsevolozhsky was also an organiser of efficiency and wisdom. Furthermore, he had served in the Russian Embassy in Paris for some years, and possessed not only the appreciation of French culture that prevailed among educated Russians, but the diplomatic skills essential for the handling of a complex, bureaucratic organisation and a heterogeneous assemblage of artists. He was also keen to follow up the success of The Sleeping Beauty, mixed as this had been; but though he had fully won Tchaikovsky's trust, difficulties surrounded the project from the start.

The subject for the opera caused few problems. Tchaikovsky had himself already fastened upon the Danish author Henrik Hertz's King René's Daughter, and this was to provide the libretto for Yolanta.

It seems that the subject of The Nutcracker was pressed on him by Vsevolozhsky, and – particularly in the wake of a disagreement over the dropping of Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades from the repertory – his feelings were ruffled. In fact, he already knew E.T.A. Hoffmann's story Nussknacker und Mausekönig ('Nutcracker and Mouse King') since on 3 February 1882 he had written from Rome to thank the critic and journalist Sergey Flerov for a manuscript copy of his 'superb translation of Hoffmann's superb story'. When he came to accept the subject, he may well also have remembered that another Hoffmann story, Der Sandmann, was the subject of one of his favourite ballets, Delibes' Coppélia.

Though presented as a children's fairytale, Hoffmann's story is a strange piece of work, mingling reality and fantasy on several different levels as was often his wont. It is set on Christmas Eve in the house of Medical Councillor Stahlbaum.

There arrives the peculiar figure of 'Uncle' Drosselmeyer: Hoffmann had had considerable childhood experience of eccentric uncles and was himself one to the family of his publisher friend Julius Hitzig. He makes Drosselmeyer bring a model castle just such as he had himself in that same year, 1816, constructed as a stage design for Burg Ringstetten in his opera Undine; and he also presents the children, Fritz and Marie, with the curious Nutcracker, for which Marie conceives tender feelings that it seems in some way to return. Drosselmeyer, we are told, is 'in no way a handsome man, but small and emaciated, with a very wrinkled face and instead of a right eye a huge black patch'. Hoffmann, who was obsessed with his own ugliness, is clearly caricaturing himself.

That night, a battle takes place between the seven-headed Mouse King and the children's toys, especially Fritz's soldiers under the generalship of the Nutcracker. Hoffmann describes their battle order with a military efficiency that impressed the Prussian General Count August Gneisenau, who the year before had served as Blücher's chief-of-staff at Waterloo and who particularly commended the strategic advantage of placing a battery on the commanding position of Mama's footstool.

However, only the intervention of Marie, throwing her slipper, settles the outcome. Next morning, Marie refuses to believe that these happenings were all a dream; and when Drosselmeyer returns to see the children, he tells them a story of Princess Pirlipat and the Mouse Queen into which are woven events from the domestic life of the Stahlbaums – and from Marie's 'dream'. Princess Pirlipat is saved from the avenging Mouse Queen, and her father welcomes visiting kings and princes with a sausage feast.

There are further fantastic complications with the enchantment of the princess, who can only be restored to her beauty by a young man who can with his own teeth crack the great nut Krakatuk. The Nussknacker story is told at a meeting of the Serapionsbrüder, the mythical gathering which Hoffmann, anticipating Schumann, peopled with characters who are aspects of his own personality. The teller of the tale is Lothar, who represents Hoffmann's most sardonic, sceptical side.

Continue to part two of three

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