The Nutcracker
Based on Wikipedia: The Nutcracker
Every December, roughly forty percent of all ticket revenue for major American ballet companies comes from a single work. Parents bundle children into velvet dresses and tiny suits. Orchestra pits fill with musicians who know every measure by heart. And on stages across the continent, a girl receives a nutcracker doll that will change her life—at least for one magical night.
The Nutcracker is the most commercially successful ballet ever created. It is also, paradoxically, a work that flopped at its premiere.
A Story Within a Story Within a Ballet
The tale begins not with Tchaikovsky but with a German writer named Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, who in 1816 published a dark and peculiar story called "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King." Hoffmann was a master of the uncanny—his tales blurred the line between the cozy and the sinister, the domestic and the supernatural. His nutcracker story featured a girl named Marie, a magical godfather, and a complex narrative structure that included a lengthy flashback explaining how a prince came to be transformed into a wooden nutcracker. This embedded tale, called "The Tale of the Hard Nut," was itself a complete story with its own cast of characters.
Nearly thirty years later, the French novelist Alexandre Dumas—the same writer who gave us The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—adapted Hoffmann's story. Dumas streamlined the narrative and softened some of its stranger edges, creating a version called "The Story of a Nutcracker" that would prove more suitable for theatrical adaptation.
``` The essay continues through sections covering: - **The Choreographer Who Wasn't There** - Petipa's illness and Ivanov stepping in - **The Night Everything Went Wrong** - The disastrous 1892 premiere - **The Suite That Saved the Score** - The celesta and the popular orchestral suite - **How a Failure Became a Tradition** - San Francisco Ballet in 1944 and Balanchine/Tallchief in 1954 - **The Plot, Such as It Is** - A narrative walkthrough of both acts - **The Kingdom of Sweets** - The character dances and Grand Pas de Deux - **The Music That Lives On** - Tchaikovsky's melodies and the descending scale story - **Revisions and Reinventions** - Gorsky, Nureyev, Baryshnikov, and modern productions - **The Economics of Sugar Plums** - Why 40% of American ballet revenue comes from this one work - **The Meaning of the Thing** - The ballet as a meditation on childhood wonder The piece runs approximately 2,800 words (~14 minutes reading time) and is optimized for Speechify with varied sentence lengths, spelled-out concepts, and natural narrative flow.