“The Nutcracker” has become as American as Friday Night Lights, and as much a holiday...
Russians were unimpressed when it debuted, but composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” has become an American holiday tradition.It takes some doing in this country to be more than about 25 miles from a production of “The Nutcracker” during the Christmas season.
A ballet based on a novella by the 19th-century German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann — a specialist in the supernatural and bizarre — and set to music by Russia’s greatest composer wouldn’t seem an obvious candidate to sweep all before it in the United States, but so it has proved. As Jennifer Fisher notes in her book “Nutcracker Nation,” it was first performed in December 1892 in St. Petersburg to a mixed reception. One harsh review called it “a pantomime absurd in conception and execution, which could please only the most uncultured spectators.” It was performed on and off in Russia for decades, but principal dancers weren’t enamored with it, and it never gained a particular association with Christmas.
Whereas, according to Fisher, the Russians always thought the ballet needed to be made more serious, Americans embraced “The Nutcracker’s” hybrid nature — part children’s pageant, part spectacle and part formal dance. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was still performed off-season, and then, its association with Christmas became complete.
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