The Nutcracker is an 1892 two-act ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. libretto is adapted from E. A. Hoffmann’s story “TheNutcracker and the Mouse King” The ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The score is noted for its use of the celesta, an instrument that the composer had already employed in his lesser known symphonic ballad The Voyevoda.
About The Nutcracker in brief
The Nutcracker is an 1892 two-act ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “TheNutcracker and the Mouse King” The ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The score is noted for its use of the celesta, an instrument that the composer had already employed in his lesser known symphonic ballad The Voyevoda. The Nutcrackers has enjoyed enormous popularity since the late 1960s. It is now performed by countless ballet companies, primarily during the Christmas season, especially in North America. Major American ballet companies generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenues from performances of The NutCracker. The ballet’s score has been used in several film adaptations of Hoffman’s story. The original production was not a success, but the 20-minute suite that TCHAikovsky extracted from the ballet was. A success in the United States, the complete ballet has become one of the most popular ballet works of all time and is performed by major ballet companies all over the world, including the Royal Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Metropolitan Ballet of New York and the Royal Conservatory of Music. The first performance was held as a double premiere together with the composer’s last opera, Iolanta, on 18 December 1892, at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Unlike in many later productions, the children’s roles were performed by real children – students of the Imperial Ballet School inSaint Petersburg, with Stanislava Belinskaya as Clara, and Vassily Stukolkin as Fritz – rather than adults.
The reaction to the dancers themselves was ambivalent. While some critics praised Dell’Era on her pointework as the Sugar Plum Fairy, one critic called her \”corpulent\” and \”podgy\”. Olga Preobrajenskaya as the Columbine doll was panned by one critic as ‘completely insipid’ and praised by another. Some critics found the transition between the mundane world of the first act and the fantasy scene of the second act too abrupt. Some found the Deux deux scene near the end of the Grand Pas de deux to be better for the ballet than for the film version of the same name. The story was criticized as not being faithful to the Hoffmann tale and for not being able to be danced by the ballerina, and many found the ballet’s choreography to be ‘lopsided’ and ‘disturbing’ The ballet has been performed in every major ballet festival since the early 1900s, with the exception of the one held in New York City in the early 1990s. The last performance of the ballet in December 2011 was held at the New York Metropolitan Opera’s Winter Garden Theatre. The performance was conducted by Italian composer Riccardo Drigo, with Antonietta Dell’Era as the sugar Plum Fairy.
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This page is based on the article The Nutcracker published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
