A Gift to the Children

This year, George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker^® celebrates 70 years of performances by New York City Ballet. The work originally debuted on February 2, 1954, on the company’s then-stage at the City Center of Music and Drama, with a resplendent Maria Tallchief—whose centennial will be celebrated next year—in the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy. In the intervening years, the ballet has become a beloved holiday tradition the world over, and nowhere more so than in New York City, where NYCB’s production is enjoyed annually by thousands of balletomanes young and old after Thanksgiving and into the new year.

But this storied work’s history stretches far further back than the middle of the last century, and reflects changing trends, ideas, and individual inspirations with broader societal reverberations. It begins in 1816, with the publication of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” Though the outlines of the story would be familiar to fans of the most popular balletic interpretations, it was, in fact, a much darker, more harrowing version of the tale usually told today. Hoffmann’s writing, which often featured inanimate objects come to perilous life—like the animatronic girl in “The Sandman,” which served as partial inspiration for Coppélia—and other flights of dark fancy, were written, in part, as a critique of the spread of the Enlightenment; Hoffmann believed the imagination was a faculty in increasingly mortal danger. In his original telling, Marie is given the family name “Stahlbaum,” which translates to “steel tree”—an indictment of her parents’ rigidity and devotion to rationality and rituals, which the little girl escapes through her interactions with the magical toy.

Less well-known to today’s audiences was Hoffmann’s origin story-within-a-story for the Nutcracker, whose curse was earned after freeing the lovely Princess Pirlipat from her own hex, delivered by the frighteningly voracious Mouse Queen and described as follows: “In place of her roseate little angel’s head crowned with golden tresses, a disproportionately large, misshapen giant’s noggin sat atop the scrunched up body of a diminutive hunchback; her wee button eyes of clearest azure had metamorphosed into a pair of huge, goggling green bug eyes, and her delicate little mouth had been distended into a hideous rictus stretching from one ear to the other.” Though the Nutcracker Marie is given isn’t quite so ugly, his transformation from a hapless young man into a grimacing toy is just as (if not more) horrifying; by excising these beginnings from their tellings, the ballets make his change back into that of a handsome prince slightly less disturbing.

In 1844, Alexandre Dumas, père published a more lighthearted, softened version of this story, emphasizing the childlike wonder of the supernatural elements and the little girl’s dreamscapes. Marie Stahlbaum became Clara Silberhaus (or “silver house”) in this version, deemphasizing the original’s political edge. It was this telling that served as the inspiration for the first balletic interpretation of The Nutcracker. Commissioned by Ivan Vsevolozhsky for the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Tschaikovsky composed a two-act ballet, with detailed outlines from choreographer Marius Petipa and footwork by Lev Ivanov, premiering on December 17, 1892. Though Tschaikovsky himself was less than enthusiastic about the assignment, and died only a year later having witnessed not the slightest inkling of the score’s eventual importance, it did present the opportunity for the composer to use a musical instrument that had only just been invented: the celesta. The Nutcracker was not the first composition to feature the celesta—nor even the first by Tschaikovsky himself—but the theme for the Sugarplum Fairy remains its definitive application.

This is the version of The Nutcracker in which a young George Balanchine performed, beginning with smaller characters like the mice and eventually that of the Prince when he was 15. The role for which he was best known was that of the “Hoops,” or Candy Cane as it is known today, in his own staging of the ballet. Balanchine learned the strikingly acrobatic solo from A.V. Shiryaev, whom Ivanov had asked to create his own Ukrainian folk dance or Trepak. In addition to such fleet footwork, Shiryaev was an early film enthusiast; when refused permission to record Imperial Ballet rehearsals, the dancer-cum-teacher developed a flipbook-style animation technique to preserve his own choreography for future generations, as outlined in a 2018 feature from The New York Times. Watching his rather crude but compelling drawings of the Trepak he’d choreographed in motion reveals one of the many ways in which history echoes throughout The Nutcracker today; it is as though a current interpretation from NYCB’s own production has been illustrated.

While the premiere of this original Nutcracker ballet was rather poorly received, the score had its early admirers, and before long, the story of Clara and her magical journey would be revisited beyond the Mariinsky stage. As Balanchine outlines in the Complete Stories of the Great Ballets, The Nutcracker was first staged in Western Europe by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in January, 1934, and in the United States by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in October, 1940, in an abridged version, with Alicia Markova and André Eglevsky in the lead roles, and relying on Markova’s prodigious memory of Ivanov’s choreography. The first full-length stateside interpretation came from the San Francisco Ballet, in 1944, choreographed by William Christensen. Then, in 1954, just six years after the establishment of New York City Ballet, one of the co-founders of City Center, Morton Baum, requested that Balanchine choreograph an evening-length, narrative work. As he writes in the Complete Stories, Balanchine “preferred to turn to The Nutcracker, with which American audiences were not sufficiently familiar. I accordingly went back to the original score, restored cuts that had been made, and in the development of the story chose to use the original story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, although keeping to the outlines of the dances as given at the Mariinsky.” Thus NYCB’s audiences today witness the adventures of Marie “steel tree” Stahlbaum, with a hint of the darker magic of The Nutcracker’s first incarnation.

Yet there were elements of the ballet presented 70 years ago that would not be recognizable to current viewers. For one, the stage at City Center was far smaller than that of the David H. Koch Theater; though the Stahlbaum’s tree would magically grow upon Marie’s midnight reverie, its height—and overall craftsmanship—were limited by budget and available space. The sets themselves, designed by Horace Armistead, were far more simplistic, relying heavily on cloud imagery to impart the story’s otherworldly setting. Once Marie and the Prince had been transported to the Sugarplum Fairy’s domain, they’d be greeted by a bevy of angels far older than their current heavenly fellows. The Coffee divertissement of the second act was created on Francisco Moncion, who was accompanied by a quartet of young “parrots” portrayed by School of American Ballet students. Sugarplum herself wore a single tutu throughout Act II, rather than changing costumes between her two dances. While his choreography was still after that of Ivanov, Balanchine had adjusted the tenor of the work to his preferred mood and themes, but his dreams for this cherished ballet from his childhood had not yet been fully realized.

That came in 1964, with The Nutcracker’s reimagining for the far greater space of what was then known as the New York State Theater. Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s sets captured the cozy yet magic-tinged confines of the Stahlbaum home, introduced towering pines to take on the 50 pounds of imitation snow of the ballet’s transitional blizzard, and transformed the Land of the Sweets into an unparalleled sugary spectacle. Karinska updated many of her own costume designs, including the introduction of the two looks for the Sugarplum Fairy to better illustrate her dual nature—the first, a rosy pink to represent her sweet, celestial aura as she welcomes Marie and the Prince, and the second a pale green that conveys the regality of her role while dancing the concluding pas de deux. Coffee was re-choreographed as a solo for Gloria Govrin, who at 5’10” handily commanded the massive new stage. But perhaps most dramatic of all was the reimagining of the tree, which, when fully grown, now towered to 41 feet tall, spread 23 feet wide, and projected a depth of 4.5 feet. This was essential to Balanchine, who wished to recreate something of the magic of the Christmas trees of his own youth, whose tinsel and aroma were frequently recalled by the choreographer. After all, “The Nutcracker,” Balanchine was often quoted to have said, “is the tree.”

But it is another change to the ballet’s vibrant second half that points to something of The Nutcracker’s lasting influence: The angels who accompany the Sugarplum Fairy’s first appearance are now portrayed by the youngest students at SAB. Though their feet are hidden by their A-framed gowns and the technique required of them is limited to floating calmly and cleanly along straight lines, their presence onstage is part and parcel to Balanchine’s vision of the role of education and entertainment for the littlest movers in the life of the company he’d co-founded. As legendary NYCB Dancer Patricia Wilde recalled for Vanity Fair in 2018, “What I heard him say a number of times, aside from his own recollections of being a child in The Nutcracker and how much he loved it, he was thinking of it as a gift to American children. A lovely Christmas experience.” And so the ballet has become for the children, and children-at-heart of all ages, who partake in its delights each year—and, we hope, for many more to come. 

_{Photos © Paul Kolnik}