Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" ballet first performed in St. Petersburg, December 1892.

"The Nutcracker is Tchaikovsky's masterpiece. He said beforehand that he would write music that would make everyone weep! [from his diary: 'As it always is after a weeping fit, old crybaby' 'slept like the dead and awoke refreshed, but with a new supply of tears which flow ceaselessly.'] I danced in The Nutcracker as a child in the Mariinsky Theater. ... Tchaikovsky remained a child all his life, he felt things like a child. He liked the German idea that man in his highest development approaches the child. Tchaikovsky loved children as themselves, not as future adults. Children contain maximum possibilities. Those possibilities often do not develop, they are lost. In every person the best, the most important part is that which remains from his childhood.

"The Nutcracker is a story by E.T.A. Hoffman that was incredibly popular in Russia. ... a serious thing wrapped into a fairy tale. The girl Marie gets a Christmas present, a toy nutcracker. At night she learns that the Nutcracker is a bewitched prince, on whom the Mouse King has declared war. Marie saves the Nutcracker from the mice. The grateful Nutcracker brings her to the kingdom of toys and sweets and then marries her. Of course ... Marie may have dreamed the whole thing. Petipa [choreographer], since he did not read German, got all the names wrong in his Nutcracker. Petipa calls the girl Clara, while in Hoffman Clara is the name of Marie's doll. ... Petipa was French. He never did learn how to speak Russian well. People say that when Petipa tried to speak Russian, he came up with all sorts of inadvertent obscenities.

"The second act of Nutcracker is more French than German ... at the time in Paris there was a fad for special spectacles in which various sweets were depicted by dancers. Actually, Nutcracker's second act is an enormous balletic sweetshop. In Petersburg there was a store like that ... had sweets and fruits from all over the world, like in 'A Thousand and One Nights.' I used to walk past and look in the windows often. ... Everything that appears in the second act of Nutcracker is a candy or something tasty. Or a toy. The Sugar Plum Fairy is a piece of candy and the dewdrops are made of sugar. The Buffon is a candy cane. It's all sugar!"

Soloman Volkov, "Balanchine's Tchaikovsky"

After Clara/Marie saves him from the wicked Mouse King and breaks the spell, the Nutcracker becomes a real boy and they dance a beautiful innocent young love pas de deux. The Royal Ballet.

Waltz of the Snowflakes ends Act 1. The New York City Ballet, George Balanchine's 1954 choreography.



Act 2. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The Bolshoi Ballet.



Sugar Plum Fairy and guy we don't know what candy he is pas de deux. To me the music expresses bittersweet loss, the end of childhood and fairy tales and innocent dreams of candy and toys, music to make everyone weep. The Royal Ballet.