Adventures of the Nutcracker before and after Tchaikovsky – Weekend – Kommersant

On December 18, 1892, the Mariinsky Theater hosted the premiere of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, which, although not immediately, became a symbol of Christmas all over the world. To the 130th anniversary of the great ballet about a toy that can crack nuts and defeat evil, Weekend found out how the fate of the Nutcracker developed throughout almost the entire history of mankind.

Text: Ulyana Volokhova

Nutcracker and Tombs

Nuts have been an important part of the human diet since antiquity, but apparently there were no special devices for cracking their shells until antiquity. Then rich people began to use two heavy metal hemispheres, while the poor, like, probably, ancient people, simply used two stones of a suitable shape. There were, however, more intricate designs. Thus, during the excavation of a Greek tomb in the Italian city of Taranto in 1930, a bronze figurine was found in the form of two hands, fastened with a hinged mechanism, which cracked a nut using leverage. According to archaeologists, this nutcracker of the end of the 4th – beginning of the 3rd century BC. e. used for practical purposes during feasts, and also placed in the tomb of the deceased – to help him in the afterlife.

The Nutcracker and the Miners

The nutcracker familiar to us – a wooden man with a grotesque jaw – appeared in Saxony. Legend has it that an evil rich man lived in the Ore Mountains, who did not want to waste his energy on splitting hazelnut shells and announced a competition for the best device for this. A soldier suggested shooting nuts with a musket, a carpenter sawing them with a saw, and a wood carver made a figurine of a man with a jaw cracking nuts and painted on it the full dress of a local miner. The rich man really liked the little man, he began to chop nuts only for them and soon even kinder – “his heart became soft, like Christmas candles.” The version of historians about how the nutcracker appeared is less radiant. In the middle of the 18th century, the city of Seifen ran out of tin, and hundreds of miners were left without work. In order to somehow support their families, they began to engage in woodcarving. One of the main areas of their work was toys: angels, stands for candles and incense in the form of people and animals, as well as nutcrackers for cracking nuts. The same miners were the first to use nutcrackers for political statements: they were made into a kind of caricature of tax collectors, gendarmes, hussars, and even specific political figures, such as Napoleon or Bismarck.

The Nutcracker and Romanticism

Thanks to fairs, the nutcrackers of the Ore Mountains quickly spread throughout Germany. At first, they were not associated with Christmas in any way and, along with other wooden toys, were a universal gift for various holidays, from Easter to All Saints Day. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann tied nutcrackers Merry Christmas in 1816. In his famous fairy tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, among many other gifts, the girl Marie receives a toy at Christmas. At first, the Nutcracker does not impress her at all, but then, together with him, she experiences a long night adventure in which they defeat the evil Mouse King and disenchant the Nutcracker, turning him into a beautiful young man. Hoffmann’s tale has become a classic of German romanticism and is considered one of the most important works about growing up.

The Nutcracker and Social Inequality

In 1851, the Nutcracker became the protagonist of another Christmas story, The Nutcracker and Poor Reynold. It was written by the namesake of the great romantic, the doctor Heinrich Hoffmann. He worked in a clinic for the poor, advocated a constitutional monarchy and believed that Germany should be socially more just. He began to engage in literary work with the advent of children – his “Sloppy Peter” (in Russian translation is known as “Stepka the tattered”) was a very popular collection of stories with a pedagogical message: terrible things happen to naughty children as a warning to young readers. The tale in verse “The Nutcracker King and Poor Reynold” was devoid of any moralizing. In a beggar’s hut on Christmas Eve, the boy Reynold falls asleep in a fever, he dreams of a wonderful toy country ruled by the crazy Nutcracker King, but all its inhabitants are happy. In the morning, Reynold wakes up completely healthy. Despite such an innocent plot, the fairy tale was briefly banned in Germany from being reprinted because of the king’s song, which contained such lines that were unpleasant for the monarchy: “I am the Nutcracker King, I gnaw hard nuts. I eat sweet kernels, and I throw the shells to the people, because I am the king. Nevertheless, “The Nutcracker King and Poor Reynold” became a very popular fairy tale among the poor – it was in this form that almost every child in Germany knew the story of the Nutcracker.

The Nutcracker and Death

In England, the nutcracker suddenly acquired an ominous halo. In 1772, the play “Nabob” by the English playwright Samuel Foote was staged and then published. It included a scene where antique dealers were sorting through their treasures and, among others, mentioned the walnut nutcracker that Henry VIII allegedly gave to Anne Boleyn on the eve of her wedding. Whether there was such a gift or not is unknown, but contemporaries who watched the play saw in it a hint of a future execution by beheading Anne Boleyn, and the connection of the nutcracker with death was entrenched in culture. For example, he appears in the painting “Isabella” (1849) by one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, John Millais. The picture follows the plot of John Keats’ poem “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (based, in turn, on one of the short stories “Decameron” by Boccaccio), in which the brothers decide to kill their sister’s lover and marry her to a rich man. One of Millet’s brothers is depicted with an evil grimace and cracking nuts with the help of a nutcracker right in front of his sister’s beloved.

The Nutcracker and Russia

In 1870, under the impression of Heinrich Hoffmann’s fairy tale “The Nutcracker King and Poor Reynold”, the master from Seifen, Friedrich Füchtner, put the production of nutcrackers on stream, and wooden men filled not only German Christmas markets, but also penetrated abroad, including Russia. By 1890, the nutcracker figurines had become so strongly associated with Christmas that the directorate of the Imperial Theaters commissioned Pyotr Tchaikovsky to compose music for a ballet based on the fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. However, the ballet was not a literal staging of a fairy tale. The libretto was written by the choreographer Marius Petipa, who did not know German and made Alexandre Dumas père’s “History of the Nutcracker” the source of the plot. Back in 1844, he translated Hoffmann’s tale into French, but in a very free manner – getting rid of the drama of growing up and reducing the plot to a story about all-conquering love. The premiere of the ballet took place on December 18, 1892 at the Mariinsky Theatre, was warmly received by the public, but categorically disliked by the critics. It was called “farce” and “the most boring and ridiculous” performance, especially critics did not like that many children’s parts were performed by students of the ballet school, who, in their opinion, had not yet reached the required level of skill. Nevertheless, the ballet took root on the Russian stage, was resumed and staged even after the revolution, despite its clear connection with the Christian holiday. According to legend, Stalin was very fond of The Nutcracker – because in it, in the person of the Mouse King, they defeat the monarchy.

The Nutcracker and World War II

Nutcrackers acquired a new – and rather unexpected – meaning after the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. First, the American soldiers who directly ended up in Germany during World War II, and then the soldiers of the American contingent in the US zone of influence in divided Germany, began to buy wooden men and send them to the USA to their relatives or take them with them as a symbol of victory. Especially popular among them were nutcrackers in the form of the Prussian army. So the nutcrackers crossed the ocean and became a popular Christmas toy and a symbol of victory in the United States.

The Nutcracker and the Cold War

In 1954, the ballet The Nutcracker to Tchaikovsky’s music was staged by the great American choreographer George Balanchine with his New York City Ballet troupe. Three years later, on Christmas Eve 1957, the tape was shown on CBS and several others, and the effect was stunning: millions of viewers watched the story with bated breath. It is hard to say what exactly caused such attention to classical ballet from the mass audience: according to one version, the intimacy of what was happening played almost the main role in this – the Americans, tired of the constant military threat and the arms race gaining momentum, were pleased to look at the world , where people exchange gifts at Christmas, and wars are the lot of tin soldiers. Be that as it may, the popularity of the Nutcracker in the United States grew rapidly. In 1961, Jacqueline Kennedy even announced The Nutcracker as the theme of Christmas in the White House and decorated the presidential residence in the appropriate style. And Newsweek magazine in 1976 described the fate of the wooden man in the United States as an American dream come true: having arrived in America under very difficult circumstances, he managed to achieve tremendous success. The Nutcracker ballet is still an integral part of the Christmas holidays in the United States, thousands of performances are performed every year, and even the smallest theater or dance troupe has some interpretation of the Nutcracker story in their repertoire.

The Nutcracker and Modernity

In today’s world, some elements of the Nutcracker ballet have been revisited as part of the fight against discrimination and getting rid of a compromised heritage. Oriental Dance, overly sexualized in many productions, was condemned for objectifying and stereotyping Arab women, Chinese Dance for stereotyping the Chinese. However, no one dared to rewrite Tchaikovsky’s score, and they began to fight discrimination in theaters with artistic methods. So, for example, the American choreographer Austin McCormick replaced Oriental Dance in his The Nutcracker with a pole dance, the San Francisco Ballet and the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater staged the Chinese Dance in the form of a traditional Dragon Dance, and the New York City Ballet simply refused away from geisha make-up and wigs and made dancing more neutral. The decision of the Berlin Ballet was the loudest: in 2021, he removed the performance from the shows. Later, the theater director explained that The Nutcracker would not be in the repertoire while specialists prepared accompanying materials for the ballet programs, which would provide historical commentary on racial and other stereotypes inherent in the works of the past. A few years earlier, the theater had already done this with the ballet Don Quixote, which stereotypically portrayed gypsies.

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