The Nutcracker premiered at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre as part of a double bill with Tchaikovsky's opera Iolanta. Critics found the plot thin and complained that a children's fairy tale made poor material for grand ballet, and even Tchaikovsky himself doubted its quality. It took decades, and a full staging boom in America after 1944, for the work to become the seasonal fixture it is today.
Tchaikovsky did not want to write The Nutcracker. He found E.T.A. Hoffmann's source story, about a girl's toy nutcracker that transforms into a prince and battles a mouse king, thin and unpromising, and he complained in letters that the commission from the Imperial Theatres felt like an obligation rather than inspiration. Choreographer Marius Petipa fell ill during preparation, leaving much of the final choreography to his assistant Lev Ivanov.
The December 6 premiere drew a lukewarm response. Reviewers admired the score's inventiveness, particularly Tchaikovsky's use of the newly invented celesta for the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, an instrument he'd discovered in Paris and smuggled into Russia to keep the sound a secret from rival composers. But they found the ballet's structure sagging, with too much pantomime and too little dancing for the adults in the second act, and the casting of children in lead roles struck traditionalists as undignified.
The ballet only became a phenomenon after San Francisco Ballet staged a full American production in 1944 and George Balanchine's New York City Ballet version in 1954 turned it into a holiday ritual. Today it's estimated that Nutcracker productions generate a significant share of annual revenue for many American ballet companies—a strange afterlife for a piece its own composer considered a lesser work.
Key people: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov