SYMHC Classics: Nutcracker

This 2021 episode covers how The Nutcracker is a Russian adaptation of a German story that wasn’t really a Christmas staple in its home country. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:03Holly Frey?

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• 1:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. The first performance of the ballet The Nutcracker took place in St. Petersburg, Russia on December 6, 1892, in the old-style calendar that Russia was still using at the time. That is December 18 on the Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar we use today. We are bringing our episode on The Nutcracker out as today's Saturday classic for its 133rd birthday, at least approximately, if you sort of disregard the calendar math.

• 2:31Holly Frey?

  This episode originally came out on December 13, 2021. Please enjoy.

• 2:41Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:55Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Nutcracker has become such a huge tradition for so many people around Christmas. I know for my own part, my mom and I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts production of The Nutcracker together for many, many years. We had a family friend a little older than me who went from being Clara as a child to being asked to come back and be the Sugarplum Fairy after she had gone on to continue her dance education in New York. For a whole lot of people, The Nutcracker is the first ballet they ever experienced, or maybe the only ballet they ever experienced. And it's by far the biggest

• 3:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  show and the biggest source of ticket revenue for a lot of ballet companies. And even if you have never experienced this whole ballet, music from The Nutcracker has also become a huge part, not just of the Christmas season, but also beyond it. Like, I can even remember a commercial from the 1980s that set a Smurf Berry Crunch jingle to the march from Act One.

• 4:07Holly Frey?

  Uh, I will maybe sing that in our behind the scenes.

• 4:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay. I will try to remember that you just said that.

• 4:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's a little odd, when you think about it, that The Nutcracker Ballet has become such a phenomenon, particularly in North America, but it's also spread to other places, too, considering that it is a Russian adaptation of a German story that was never really a Christmas staple in its home country. So that is the story that we are going to tell on the show today.

• 4:43Holly Frey?

  The ballet The Nutcracker is based on the 1816 story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, or ETA Hoffmann. His name at birth was actually Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, but he changed Wilhelm to Amadeus out of admiration for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Hoffmann was born in 1776 in Konigsberg, Prussia, now Kaliningrad, Russia, although he spent most of his adult life in what is now Germany.

• 5:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hoffmann wore a lot of hats. He trained as a lawyer and served as a law officer before turning his attention to music. He worked as a composer and a music critic. He was also an artist, a theater director, and a writer, and his written work included a lot of fairy tales, including works for children. His fiction tended to be pretty haunting and strange, with stories that carried a whole sense of ambiguity. They blurred the lines or toyed with the relationships between imagination and reality. And this included his work for young readers, even though a lot of children's literature at that point tended to focus more on more heavy-handed didactic stories and morality tales. That

• 5:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  wasn't the only stuff being published, but a lot of it was very, very moralizing.

• 6:02Holly Frey?

  The Nutcracker and the Mouse King is sometimes described as the first fantasy written specifically for children. The story contains 14 short chapters, some of which just stop, rather than reaching any sort of logical pause in the narrative. There is some speculation that it was broken up this way so that it could be read one chapter per night, starting on Christmas Eve, as the story does, and ending with epiphany on January 6.

• 6:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  So parts of the story will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Nutcracker Ballet. The main character is a seven-year-old girl, although her name is Marie Stahlbaum, not Clara Silberhaus, as it is in a lot of productions of The Nutcracker. She has a younger brother Fritz and an older sister Louise, although Louise does not play a big part in the story. Their godfather, Drosselmeyer, is both beloved and a little frightening. He is old and mysterious and wears an eye patch, and he arrives on Christmas Eve with gifts for the family.

• 7:02Holly Frey?

  One of those gifts is an ingenious clockwork palace, but the children, especially Fritz, are quickly bored of it. The clockwork figures just do the same thing over and over. Then Marie finds a nutcracker among the other Christmas gifts. Basic tools made to crack nuts have existed at least since the 14th century, but carved wooden nutcracker dolls, typically made to look like soldiers, started to become popular in 17th-century Germany. In the story, the nutcracker is meant as a gift for everyone, but Marie is particularly taken with it and deeply upset when her brother breaks it by forcing it to crack a nut that is much too big.

• 7:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  Marie tries to bind up the nutcracker's injury with a ribbon, and Drosselmeyer does a more thorough repair later on. That night, Marie puts the nutcracker to bed, and that's where the name Clara comes in. Clara is Marie's new doll, and Marie commandeers Clara's doll bed so that the nutcracker will have a comfortable place to recuperate.

• 8:07Holly Frey?

  As she is checking on the nutcracker late at night, Marie sees the Mouse King and his army preparing for a war against her brother's toy soldiers, who have all come alive. The doll Clara saves the nutcracker when he tries to make a foolhardy leap from the top of a high shelf to join in the fray. Marie also sees Drosselmeyer on top of the grandfather clock in place of the owl that is normally there, although he does not intervene in the fight with the mice. After hitting the Mouse King with her shoe, Marie swoons and later wakes up in her own bed.

• 8:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  So a lot of what we have just said follows a lot of the action of Act One in most productions of The Nutcracker. So if you've seen The Nutcrackers, probably pretty familiar. But then Hoffman's story. Marie cuts her arm on a piece of broken glass during this battle. And when Drosselmeyer comes to visit her during her recovery, he tells her a story, one involving a royal clockmaker also named Drosselmeyer. In this story within a story, clockmaker Drosselmeyer served a king and queen who had a beautiful baby daughter, Princess Perlepatt. The queen was preparing fat to make sausages or puddings, which were the king's favorite dish, when Lady Mousrink, who's basically the queen of the mice,

• 9:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  asked her for some of it. The queen obliged, but then Lady Mousrink and her kin ate so much of the fat that there was not enough left for the king's puddings.

• 9:38Holly Frey?

  The king was furious, and Drosselmeyer, the clockmaker, decided to use his ingenuity to build traps to get rid of all the mice. Lady Mousrink, of course, did not appreciate that so many of her kin were killed in the royal family's new mousetraps. So she cursed Princess Perlepatt with ugliness. After consulting with the royal astrologer, Drosselmeyer determined that Princess Perlepatt could only be cured with a supernaturally hard Krakatoch nut, cracked open and presented to her by a young man who had never been shaved and never worn boots.

• 10:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  After years and years of searching, Drosselmeyer finally found a Krakatoch nut in possession of his brother in Nuremberg. And his brother's son, so his nephew, turned out to have never been shaved and never worn boots. Uncle and nephew returned to the palace with the nut, where a long line of potential suitors lined up to try to bite it open. All of them failed until the younger Drosselmeyer, that nephew, the last in line, succeeded.

• 10:44Holly Frey?

  But the young Drosselmeyer and Princess Perlopat did not live happily ever after. Just after breaking the curse on the princess, the clockmaker's nephew accidentally stepped on Lady Mouserink, killing her. With her dying breath, Lady Mouserink cursed him, transforming him into a Nutcracker. Princess Perlopat, horrified, banished the Nutcracker and his uncle, the Clockmaker. The royal astronomer, who was also exiled for his role in all of this, predicted that the Nutcracker's curse would be lifted only if someone fell in love with him.

• 11:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Of course, at this point, Marie, hearing this story, concludes that it is real that her beloved Nutcracker toy is really the transmogrified nephew of the royal Clockmaker, and that royal Clockmaker is none other than her godfather, Drosselmeyer. Marie demands to know why Drosselmeyer is not helping his nephew. After all, she saw him right there on the clock on the night that the Nutcracker fought the Mouse King.

• 11:46Holly Frey?

  Once Marie has deduced what's going on, the Mouse King starts demanding tribute, eating his way through all her treats and toys. Then one day, she notices that the Nutcracker has a spot of blood on his neck. As she's cleaning it off, he asks for a sword. She gives it to him, and he is finally victorious in his fight against the Mouse King, cutting off the Mouse King's seven heads and presenting Marie with seven little crowns.

• 12:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Nutcracker takes Marie to a magical kingdom with meadows made of candy, a lemonade river, and towns made of gingerbread and bonbons. She soon learns that the Nutcracker is the prince of Kompeturenburg, or the Kingdom of Sweets.

• 12:31Holly Frey?

  Marie once again wakes up in her own bed, and when she tries to tell her family what has happened, they are dismissive. But soon, her godfather, Drosselmeyer's, young nephew arrives from Nuremberg. The nephew thanks Marie for saving him, and he proposes. A year and a day later, Marie and the younger Drosselmeyer marry, and from there reign as king and queen of the Kingdom of Sweets.

• 12:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  This whole story is twisting and layered. It folds back on itself at various points. Marie often tells her parents what she's experienced and seen, only for them to blame her fevered mind and order her to stop telling such wild tales. As her godfather Drosselmeyer tells her this story, he also suggests that it's real. But then, when he talks to her parents, he dismisses what she's saying as fancy. As one example, he tells her parents that the Mouse King's seven crowns are a gift that he gave her years before, certainly not something belonging to a seven-headed Mouse King.

• 13:36Holly Frey?

  Gaslighting. The book's tone is fairly ominous, actually, and it draws heavily from German Romanticism. The Brothers Grimm and their dark and sometimes gruesome collections of fairy tales date from around this same time. Past podcast subject Casper David Friedrich was another of Hoffman's contemporaries, and many of his landscapes have a similarly eerie and foreboding, although still very beautiful, feel.

• 14:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  But in 1844, more than 20 years after ETA Hoffman's death, past podcast subject Alexandre Dumas-Pere adapted The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and translated it into French. The resulting book had the same basic plot and the same sort of story within a story, but with a tone that was generally a lot lighter and more cheerful than the original. And it is this version that was adapted into a ballet.

• 14:29Holly Frey?

  Or at least, part of it was. We're going to talk more about that after a sponsor break.

• 14:37Speaker 04

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• 15:05Speaker 05

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• 15:07Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:36Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:48Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:06Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:48Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 17:57Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 18:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Russia in 1840, and he started composing music by the age of four and taking piano lessons at five. But Russia didn't have a formal system of education for musicians and composers yet, so it did not occur to his parents at first that this could be a career for him. So, they focused his education on the idea that he would become a civil servant. That eventually changed, though. He became one of the first students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory after it was established in 1862. And he eventually became famous both within and outside of Russia, composing seven symphonies,

• 18:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  11 operas, and various concertos, cantatas, quartets, choral works, and three ballets: Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker.

• 19:07Holly Frey?

  And The Nutcracker Ballet was part of a two-part commission from Russia's Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, the other part being a one-act opera. The ballet was his second collaboration to include both Imperial Theatre's director Ivan Vesavlovsky and French choreographer Marius Petipa, chief choreographer of the Imperial Ballet. The three men had previously worked together on The Sleeping Beauty with Vesavlovsky commissioning the work, writing the libretto and being heavily involved in the costume and set design, and Petipa choreographing the ballet and providing detailed instructions to Tchaikovsky on the music.

• 19:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Sleeping Beauty had been a success after opening at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1890. And Vesavlovsky was hoping for something similar to happen with The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker and The Mouse King had become a well-known and widely-read children's story, and he chose Alexandre Dumas' adaptation of it as the ballet's starting point.

• 20:07Holly Frey?

  Even though classical ballet does not typically include spoken language or narration, by the 19th century, the process of creating a ballet generally started still with a libretto, a written narrative laying out the story that the ballet would tell. The composer, choreographer, set designer, and costume designer, basically everyone who worked on creating the ballet, would rely on this libretto to translate the story for the stage. The Nutcracker's libretto is generally credited to both Vesavlovsky and Petipa, although it is not entirely clear who did what in preparing it.

• 20:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  But the Nutcracker collaboration among these men did not seem to have gone as well as it did with The Sleeping Beauty. With both ballets, Petipa provided Tchaikovsky with detailed instructions about the type of music that was needed, as in the full ballet was broken down into its scenes and dances and variations, with Petipa giving very precise instructions about how many measures of what kind of music was needed for each of them. It reads almost like a shopping list. But in The Sleeping Beauty, these notes and the libretto, they had added up to a story that had deeper themes, which Tchaikovsky could explore through musical devices like leitmotifs.

• 21:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  These represented aspects of the story while also unifying the ballet. In addition to the story of Princess Aurora, The Sleeping Beauty also dealt with themes of good versus evil, and Tchaikovsky could just explore all of this and represent it through music.

• 21:42Holly Frey?

  Meanwhile, the libretto for The Nutcracker had abandoned the deeper themes and ambiguities of Hoffman's story. The entire middle portion of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King had been cut almost entirely, leaving only the Christmas party, Drosselmeyer bringing gifts, the battle between The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and the voyage to the Kingdom of Sweets. After a grand final waltz, The Nutcracker was to end with an apotheosis with a beehive surrounded by bees. The main character, now-named Clara, did not return home after her travels through the Kingdom of Sweets, so it really wasn't even clear what the point of it all was.

• 22:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  On top of his creative dissatisfaction, Tchaikovsky experienced depression and anxiety throughout his life, along with social pressures and taboos stemming from his attraction to other men at a time when homosexuality was both illegal and deeply stigmatized. And all of this may have fed into his struggle to get started on The Nutcracker. In April of 1891, he wrote to Zevlosky about it, saying, "Here in Rouen, I had to call on extraordinary willpower to make an agonizing effort in order to work. As a result, what comes out is colorless, dry, hasty, and wretched. The awareness that things are not going well

• 23:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  torments me and agonizes me to the point of sickness. A consuming depression constantly gnaws at my heart, and I have not for a long time felt as unhappy as now."

• 23:18Holly Frey?

  The day after Tchaikovsky wrote this letter, he learned, by reading it in a newspaper, that his sister Alexandra had died. He was, at that moment, on the way to board a ship for a tour of the United States, where he would, among other things, conduct music he had composed at the grand opening of Carnegie Hall.

• 23:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  This would have been terrible in any circumstance, but this was particularly terrible timing. But Tchaikovsky did not cancel his tour or his appearances in the United States. Instead, it seems as though he took this transatlantic voyage as a time to contemplate and to refocus. Music historians and theorists have noted that The Nutcracker incorporates more borrowed folk melodies and existing musical themes than most of his other work does, kind of suggesting that, once he did finally get underway, he still had trouble feeling creative. There's also some suggestion that the character of the Sugarplum Fairy is meant to embody his late sister, who was known to the family as Sasha.

• 24:20Holly Frey?

  Tchaikovsky may not have been the only person who was facing very real creative trouble with The Nutcracker. Although Marius Petipa had been the one to write Tchaikovsky's instructions for the music and initial notations for the choreography, he did not choreograph most of the ballet. He became ill shortly after that work began, and he left most of it to his assistant, Lev Ivanov. According to Petipa's memoirs, Ivanov did all the staging and choreographed all the dances. Petipa was 73 when this happened, but there is some speculation that he really wasn't all that sick, and he just kind of didn't want to work on this nonsensical show.

• 24:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Ivanov worked from Petipa's notes, but he didn't always follow them. For example, in Act II, Petipa called for, quote, "trapek", for the end of the dance turning on the floor. Trapek is a folk dance from Ukraine and Russia, but Ivanov took this piece in a totally different direction, using hoops. And lead dancer Alexander Shuryev choreographed his part himself. This is why, in some productions of The Nutcracker Day, trapek is this intensely athletic dance full of leaping and squatting and dancers that are dressed as peasants or maybe Cossacks will. In others, they are in candy stripes and dancing with hoops. If you've only seen the first version, the first time you've seen the second one.

• 25:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  You might feel like it was a ripoff.

• 25:48Holly Frey?

  Um, yeah. Tchaikovsky compiled a Nutcracker suite featuring selections from the ballet, which was first performed in March of 1892. And the full ballet premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia on December 18th of that year, or December 6th, under the old-style calendar. It followed Tchaikovsky's one-act opera Iolanta, which had also been the other part of this commission.

• 26:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the criticisms of Tchaikovsky's work during his lifetime was that it was not Russian enough. But the Nutcracker includes several elements that are really hallmarks of this period of Russian theater and ballet. This is really considered to be Russian ballet's golden age. Tsar Alexander III was a patron of the arts and the theater, and a lot of the work that was created during his reign involved dramatic sets and costumes and the sorts of spectacles that the czar generally enjoyed.

• 26:44Holly Frey?

  Much of the second act of The Nutcracker is also essentially a court celebration, with Clara, as a guest to the Kingdom of Sweets, being presented with a pageant of all of the kingdom's best and brightest. And some of this court review highlights Russia in its presentation, especially the series of Spanish, Chinese, Arabian, and Russian dances, also known as chocolate, tea, coffee, tripak. Especially in Petipa's original notations, tripak was to be the showstopper, suggesting that Russia was the best among nations. These dances combine with others in Act II to suggest the idea of many nations living together harmoniously under the rule of one benevolent monarch,

• 27:26Holly Frey?

  that is, the Sugarplum Fairy, along with her prince. A 2016 article in the journal Dance Research by Damien Maillay also explores the idea that the use of French songs and costumes inspired by fashion of the French revolutionary era allude to the alliance between France and Russia that developed in the 1890s.

• 27:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  And Tsar Alexander III does seem to have liked this ballet. Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother saying that the czar, quote, "was delighted, and sent for me to his box and said a whole lot of kind words."

• 28:01Holly Frey?

  I love that. A whole lot of kind words. It's just a great turn of phrase. But as for everybody else, reviews a little bit mixed and the bad reviews were often explicitly and pointedly bad. People pointed out the same aspects of the libretto that had caused Tchaikovsky so much frustration, including the fact that Act One and Act Two almost felt like two totally different ballets, neither of which made a whole lot of sense. Some critics insisted that Act One was barely a ballet at all. People mostly stood around and pantomimed.

• 28:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the words of one critic, quote, "First of all, The Nutcracker can under no condition be called a ballet. It does not satisfy even one of the demands of a ballet. Ballet as a basic genre of art is mimed drama and consequently must contain all the elements of norm drama. On the other hand, there must be a place in ballet for plastic attitudes and dances made up of the entire essence of classical choreography. There is nothing of this in The Nutcracker. There is not even a subject."

• 29:07Holly Frey?

  And also, the stage was full of children. At this point in Russian ballet history, younger ballet students did not usually share the stage with older teens and adults. Reviewers bemoaned the fact that this ballet seemed to have been made by children for children. To add to that, many of the boys in it were not dance students at all. They had been recruited from a military academy.

• 29:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  The focus on children in the ballet's first act also meant that the most striking balletic performances done by the company's most prominent dancers didn't happen until very late in the evening in Act Two. And because The Nutcracker followed this other one-act opera, that meant that they got on stage very, very late. People felt like they had watched a whole opera and then a bunch of kids running around for an hour before the real ballet even started. And then that ballet was over with no real resolution.

• 30:02Holly Frey?

  Overall, though, Tchaikovsky's score was praised, although sometimes that praise was a little bit backhanded, as in, quote, "In sum, it's a pity that so much good music is expended on such nonsense, so unworthy of attention." But the music in general is excellent. Tchaikovsky clearly had huge trouble getting started and found the early work on the ballet incredibly difficult, but it does seem that he was pleased enough with the score once he was actually done with it.

• 30:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  One thing to note here is that we don't actually have the choreography from The Nutcracker's debut performances. Petippe's instructions to Tchaikovsky have survived, along with his notes in the libretto, but the oldest surviving set of more complete, comprehensive notes was not written down until a few years later. So it's not really clear whether any of the criticisms of the dancing itself led the choreography to evolve over the Mariinsky Theatre's 1892 to 93 ballet season. Once that season was over, though, it does not appear that major changes were made to The Nutcracker until after the Russian Revolution.

• 31:09Holly Frey?

  While the ballet's reception was mixed to poor, its music became far more popular, particularly The Nutcracker Suite. Orchestras in Europe and North America started performing The Nutcracker Suite in the early to mid 1890s, and it became widely recognizable on both sides of the Atlantic.

• 31:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  It wasn't until decades later that The Nutcracker became a winter holiday tradition, though. We'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.

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• 32:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life. Love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy only

• 32:55Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 33:08Speaker 08

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• 35:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  After the 1892 to 1893 ballet season, The Nutcracker only made spotty appearances on Russian stages for a while. Sometimes companies performed only the second act or a selection of highlights. The ballet was revived in 1909, and in 1919, Alexander Gorski staged a version that combined the character of Clara with the Sugarplum Berry for the first time. Vasily Vinonin introduced new choreography in 1934, also casting adult dancers in what had originally been children's roles. But overall, The Nutcracker's appearances on Russian and then Soviet stages was pretty spotty.

• 35:56Holly Frey?

  Although the narrative takes place at Christmas, it also was not a Christmas standard. Easter is really the more important and festive holiday in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Soviet Union also banned Christmas celebrations in the late 1920s, leading to the rise of New Year's as a secular holiday.

• 36:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Nutcracker was performed outside of Russia in the Soviet Union for the first time in 1934. That was in London, based on choreographic notes by Nicholas Sergeev, who had been the company manager of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. When he left Russia in 1918, he had taken the choreography for more than 20 ballets with him. They had been recorded using a dance notation method that had been developed by Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov.

• 36:45Holly Frey?

  In 1940, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo presented "Selections from the Nutcracker" while on tour in the US. Then Disney's Fantasia debuted in theaters on November 13th of 1940. This film was not a financial success, in part because WWII shut down movie theaters in Europe, but it is credited with popularizing classical music in the United States, including "Selections from the Nutcracker Suite."

• 37:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some of the Nutcracker pieces in Fantasia include "The Dance of the Sugarplum Berry," during which fairies flitter about, opening flowers and sending dewdrops down spider webs, mushrooms twirl around during the Chinese dance, there are long-tailed fish that gracefully swim around in coffee, and thistles that very energetically dance during trapeze.

• 37:37Holly Frey?

  Although neither the fish nor the mushrooms are human, they both retain some of the exoticized stereotype depictions that are often part of the Nutcracker ballet during the Chinese and Arabian dances. The mushrooms, for example, have slanted eyes and a posture that suggests they're wearing robes, and the fish's movement and sensual demeanor suggests a harem. Fantasia has a content warning when viewed on Disney+ today noting that it "includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures," although that's usually interpreted as referencing centaurs who appear in the Pastoral Symphony, some of which have been cut out of the current version of the film.

• 38:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  When introducing the Nutcracker Suite portion of Fantasia, narrator Deems Taylor explains that the Nutcracker Suite is part of a ballet that wasn't much of a success and "nobody performs it nowadays." That was more or less true in 1940, but today that sentence is hilarious. Four years after Fantasia, the San Francisco Ballet staged the first US performance of the full Nutcracker ballet. The ballet's founder and choreographer William Christiansen talked through ideas for it with choreographer George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova of Ballet Russe.

• 39:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Christensen had never actually seen the full Nutcracker Ballet and later said that these conversations, and particularly Balanchine's insights, had a huge influence on the San Francisco production.

• 39:12Holly Frey?

  Then, in 1954, The Nutcracker opened at the New York City Ballet with choreography by co-founder George Balanchine, whose name has been anglicized from George Balanchivadze. He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1904, and he had studied at the Imperial School of Ballet and the Mirinsky Theater. He appeared in productions of The Nutcracker before the Russian Revolution, which means that he learned and observed choreography that had started with Petipa and Ivanov back in the 19th century. He also learned other versions by other choreographers before leaving Russia in 1924. Lincoln Kirstein invited Balanchine to the US in 1933 to establish the School of American Ballet and the American Ballet Company.

• 39:57Holly Frey?

  Kirstein and Balanchine went on to establish the New York City Ballet in 1948.

• 40:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the New York City Ballet's 1954 Nutcracker, past podcast subject Maria Tallchief danced to the part of The Sugarplum Fairy. Tallchief was a citizen of Osage Nation and is regarded as the first prima ballerina in the United States. In this version, the young protagonist's name is Marie rather than Clara, and Marie, the Nutcracker, pranced in other roles in this first one were danced by almost 40 children from the School of American Ballet. This production was also one in which tray pack features dancers dressed in candy stripes dancing with hoops. Although Balanchine's Nutcracker first opened on February 2nd of 1954, it quickly became the heart of a special holiday ballet season, and the New York City Ballet has performed

• 40:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  it every year since then.

• 40:50Holly Frey?

  A lot of what made The Nutcracker so reviled in Russia in 1892 had nearly the opposite effect in the United States in 1954. It was still not a show that made a lot of sense from a plot standpoint, but it captured a sense of childlike holiday wonder. The audience's response was less, "Oh, what are these children doing here? This is ballet," and more, "Oh, look at those kids, they're adorable! This is wholesome family entertainment." Even without a logical plot to follow, The Nutcracker seemed to celebrate values like home and family and holiday cheer, and that was not an accident. Balanchine and the rest of the creative team at the New York City Ballet had understood that their company desperately needed something that could have mass

• 41:33Holly Frey?

  appeal, and the Nutcracker wound up suiting that need extremely well.

• 41:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  And even though this was happening during the Cold War, when the United States was deeply and increasingly distrustful of the Soviet Union, which makes it seem real weird that people would get so excited about a Russian ballet, ballet was actually something of an exception. One of the many, many ways that the US and the USSR maintained a rivalry and competed with each other during the Cold War was through dance and ballet specifically.

• 42:06Holly Frey?

  An abridged version of the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker aired on CBS in 1957, and then a somewhat more complete version aired the following year in 1958 with Balanchine in the role of Drosselmeyer. In the 1958 version, June Lockhart, who had recently replaced Clarice Leachman as Timmy's adoptive mother on the TV show Lassie, provides an opening introduction in which she says, quote, "Christmas Day isn't Christmas without a real, old-fashioned story of magic and miracles." Two televised ballets two years in a row established the Nutcracker as an invented tradition.

• 42:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  It reminds me a little bit of the Yes, Virginia story that

• 42:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  had a similar trajectory. So Balanchine's Nutcracker was huge for the New York City Ballet and for ballet as a whole. As its popularity spread, it became the production that ballet companies used to help fund the rest of their season, sometimes getting about half of the year's ticket revenue just from the Nutcracker. That, of course, is a blessing and a curse. One widely repeated quote that's often attributed to dance critic Richard Buckle is that each Christmas, quote, "We are all one Nutcracker closer to death."

• 43:26Holly Frey?

  For much of its history before this point, ballet had typically been performed on grand stages and before royal courts. And while the Nutcracker is certainly still performed among elite dance companies on prestigious stages, it's also found a home in places like elementary schools and youth centers. It has spurred on the popularity of ballet as an art form.

• 43:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  The popularity of the Nutcracker also goes beyond ballet. It's one of the reasons why decorative nutcrackers ultimately spread beyond Germany, especially as holiday decorations. In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy chose nutcracker ballet-themed decorations for a Christmas tree in the Blue Room at the White House, and that established the tradition to have a themed Christmas tree at the presidential residence.

• 44:16Holly Frey?

  Sadly, the people who were most involved in the original creation of the Nutcracker did not live to see this success and influence. Lev Ivanov died in 1901 at the age of 67. Ivan Vesevolovsky died in 1909 at the age of 74, and Marius Petipa died in 1910. He was 92 at that point. All three of them outlived Piotr Ilyatschukovsky, who died on November 6, 1893, or October 25 in the old-style calendar. His cause of death at the time was reported as cholera, but there is also speculation that he took his own life and that this may have been connected to a matter of honor related to his sexual orientation. He was only 53 at the time, and the Nutcracker was his last ballet.

• 45:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the things that we've touched on a little bit is that parts of the Nutcracker often involve racist stereotypes, especially the national dances of Spanish or chocolate, Arabian or coffee, Chinese or tea, and Russian or trapek. Trapek, of course, was meant to be a reflection of Russian ideals, including bravery and physical and military prowess, especially in its original conception as a folk dance. Although the music for the Arabian dance is adapted from a Georgian lullaby, it and the Spanish Arabian and Chinese dances have historically all used musical elements and costumes and choreography to suggest some racial and ethnic stereotypes.

• 45:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  How or whether ballet companies staging The Nutcracker have dealt with this in more recent years is really all over the place, from making zero changes to re-envisioning those pieces in a completely different direction, to hiring dancers from places like China and the Middle East to re-choreograph those pieces in a more authentic way.

• 46:04Holly Frey?

  The Nutcracker has also proved itself to be almost infinitely adaptable. At this point, there are multiple film and TV versions, along with prequels, sequels, and re-imaginings. Although many stage productions are based on Balanchine's choreography, or on other choreography that has its roots in the work of Petipa and Ivanov, there are so many others who are going to list just a few examples.

• 46:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the 1980s, the Pacific Northwest Ballet and choreographer Kent Stoll wanted to return to the spirit of ETA Hoffman's original story. To that end, they brought in Maurice Sendak to design the sets and write the libretto for a new staging of The Nutcracker. This became the Pacific Northwest Ballet's version of The Nutcracker for about three decades, and it was released as a film in 1986. They also published a translation of ETA Hoffman's story as a book that was translated by Ralph Mannheim and accompanied by Sendak's illustrations.

• 47:04Holly Frey?

  A version called Hard Nut debuted in Brussels in 1991, and it uses Tchaikovsky's score and is based on the ETA Hoffman story, but it is a satiric comedy with choreography by Mark Morris and a production designed based on the work of illustrator and cartoonist Charles Burns.

• 47:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Harlem Nutcracker debuted in 1996, choreographed by Donald Byrd and working off of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's arrangement of The Nutcracker Suite. And in this ballet, Clara is a widowed grandmother facing her first Christmas without her late husband.

• 47:39Holly Frey?

  Debbie Allen Dance Academy's Hot Chocolate Nutcracker incorporates all kinds of different music and dance styles, with The Rats narrating the story. Parts of this are shown in the 2020 documentary Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker.

• 47:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then there are also just smaller, special touches that ballet companies around the world have used to ground their productions of The Nutcracker in a particular time and place. And that includes, in its home of Russia, Moscow Ballet's Great Russian Nutcracker includes a giant Matryoshka doll and Russian folk figures like Dead Moroz and Snegirushka. This ballet's heroine is known as Masha, which is a Russian derivative of the name Marie. Oh, Nutcracker. We'll talk about some more Nutcracker stuff in the behind the scenes, because There's so much. I have notes. I have experience as an audience member, and you have experience as a dancer. Yup.

• 48:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 49:00Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:31Tracy V. Wilson?

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