In one gruesome battle between this nutcracker prince and the seven-headed mouse king, Marie falls, ostensibly in a fevered dream, into a glass cabinet, cutting her arm badly. Hoffmann’s 1816 fairy tale, on which the ballet is based, is troubling: Marie, a young girl, falls in love with a nutcracker doll, whom she only sees come alive when she falls asleep. How, then, with such an unpropitious beginning, did 'The Nutcracker' become the most performed ballet of all time, and a holiday tradition for even non-balletomanes?Į.T.A. Petersburg Gazette called it “the most tedious thing I have ever seen.” When the revolution broke out a few years later, the theater stopped performing the ballet altogether, and many dancers lost their jobs. The choreography was dismissed as “confusing” in some scenes, the libretto was deemed “lopsided,” and the grumpy reviewer sent by the St. The now-beloved and perhaps overly familiar holiday ballet premiered as a double feature with Tchaikovsky’s opera 'Iolanta,' with Czar Alexander III in attendance.ĭepending on whom you ask, the critics ranged from lukewarm to downright hostile in their reviews. But of course it once was heard for the very first time, one week before Christmas in 1892, by the sold-out audience of the Maryinsky Theater in St. Having danced 'The Nutcracker' daily from September to December for 11 years in various roles, I find it difficult to remember hearing the opening strains of Tchaikovsky's ballet for the first time.

Nutcracker by eta hoffmann