The Story of The Nutcracker: From Book to Ballet

December 21, 2023

History

Literature

Nesha Ruther

Writer at Bond & Grace

“Music reveals an unknown kingdom to mankind.”-E.T.A. Hoffmann

The Nutcracker Ballet is one of the most cherished Christmas traditions of all time, in which young Clara receives a Nutcracker for Christmas and dreams he comes to life and battles the villainous Mouse King. In the second Act, Clara and the Nutcracker Prince travel to a winter wonderland where they are hosted by the beautiful Sugarplum Fairy. This iconic story has won the hearts of children for generations, but the story of its creation is just as interesting, with many twists and turns along the way.

Published in 1816, the original short story “The Nutcracker and the Mouseking” was written by German writer, composer, and painter Ernst Theodor Amadeus (E.T.A.) Hoffmann.

Hoffmann was born in 1776 in then-Prussia and worked for the Prussian government before returning to his love for music in 1806. He was such a lover of music he changed his baptism name from Wilhelm to Amadeus as a way of honoring Mozart. He also became a prolific writer and wrote over 50 short stories including what we now know as The Nutcracker.

However, Hoffmann’s original story looks quite a bit different from The Nutcracker we have come to know and love. His version of the fantasy was less sugarplum fairy and more eerie nightmare, in which the young Marie falls in love with her Nutcracker doll and experiences a violent fever dream in which the Nutcracker conducts gruesome warfare against the Mouse King, who in Hoffmann’s original had not one, not two, but seven heads!

In the story, Marie’s family forbids her from speaking of her dreams, but she refuses to listen and runs away to the doll kingdom with her Nutcracker fiancee. In Hoffman’s writing, the real world is subject to invasion by sinister magical forces, and Marie’s love story can just as easily be seen as a young girl’s disappearance.

In 1845, French writer Alexandre Dumas (author of The Three Musketeers) adapted Hoffmann’s short story and published it as The History of a Nutcracker.

Dumas gave the story a lighter and more whimsical tone than the original. Allegedly, his adaptation came about at a Christmas party where he was tied to a chair by a group of children demanding a story!

In 1891, the Director of Moscow’s Imperial Theatre, Ivan Vsevolozhsky commissioned the story to be turned into a ballet. Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky set it to music and it was choreographed by Marius Petipa, who is widely considered the father of Russian ballet.

In the now-iconic number, The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, Petipa said he wanted the music to sound like “drops of water shooting from a fountain.” Tchaikovsky broke ground by using the Celesta, an orchestral percussion instrument that resembles a small upright piano, to create the ringing, ethereal sounds we have come to know so well.

The Nutcracker premiered at the Imperial Theatre a week before Christmas 1892 to mixed reviews, Czar Nicholas loved it, but critics overall did not, one called it “the most tedious thing I have ever seen."

Despite an enthusiastic reception, The Nutcracker would not be performed outside of Russia until 1934, when it was performed in England. Ten years later, the U.S. would stage its first performance at the San Francisco Ballet. Given Hoffmann’s passion for music, we have no doubt he would be thrilled by the famed musical accompaniment his story would become associated with.

The Nutcracker we have come to know and love was choreographed by George Balanchine and premiered in New York in 1954, it has been performed by the New York City Ballet every year since then. Today, it makes up an average of 48% of annual ticket sales for ballets across the country

Yet some theaters have expressed a desire to return to Hoffmann’s original story. In the 1980s The Pacific Northwest Theatre staged a production more closely aligned with the original.

For help, they commissioned a writer and illustrator well-versed in children’s literature that is unafraid to explore darker themes, Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are. “It is a very bizarre story and that, of course, would appeal to me,” Sendak said of working on “The Nutcracker and the Mouseking.” “It had bite and muscle the way Grimm fairy tales do.”

Whether you’re seeking out a charming Christmas classic, or prefer stories with dark and thorny undertones, The Nutcracker remains timeless in its appeal and innovation. From German origins to French and Russian adaptation to wild success across the Atlantic, it reminds us just how magical the season can be when you have a child’s eye for wonder and a mind for imagination.