Behind the Music – Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker

The Nutcracker is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 fairy tale Nussknacker und Mausekönig (Nutcracker and Mouse King) via a French retelling by Alexandre Dumas. The original story is a rich and subtly humorous story for children while offering irony and literary allusions that only adults would understand. Ahead of its time in having no moral or didactic agenda, it blurs fantasy and reality as strange nocturnal events take place in the same world that the children inhabit.

Central to the success of Nutcracker is the brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations and his imaginative use of instrumental color, together with a powerful deployment of harmony for dramatic effect.

The orchestration of Nutcracker is never less than magical—not just magical in effect but magical in dramatic significance. Every time the scenario touches on the supernatural or the extraordinary, Tchaikovsky does something special in the orchestra. The Magic Castle at the beginning of Act II charms with flourishing flutes and rippling passages from the harp and celesta. For the following number where Petipa describes a rose-water fountain, Tchaikovsky creates a sweetly cascading sound in the flutes using a technique, frulato, he’d learned from a flute-playing colleague in Kiev. It’s essentially flutter-tonguing, ahead of its time.

But the most magical of all is the bell-like celesta that is the signature sound of the Sugar-Plum Fairy, heard at the beginning of Act II and coming into its own for her solo variation in the pas de deux. While in Paris, Tchaikovsky had been seduced by the “glistering tones” of this marvelous new instrument: “something between a small piano and a Glockenspiel.” Wanting to surprise Russian audiences (and his composer colleagues!) he had one shipped secretly to Saint Petersburg, refusing at first to even make it available for practice, although he did specify that the musician had to be a very good pianist! The celesta works its enchantments in the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy—a distillation of the delicate effects, exotic color, and lyricism that make Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker so irresistible.