blog
NUTCRACKER!!!
It seems pleasantly surprising to me that amidst all the sanctimonious discussion (often bordering on intolerance) that surrounds celebration and inclusion or exclusion of various religious holidays around this time of year that the Nutcrackerstory and music should still be so ensconced in our celebrations. It is, after all, a tale that has very little, if anything, to do with celebrating the birth of a religious leader or the divine preference for any particular nation-state and everything to do with exploring the inner world of childhood and adolescent yearnings and fears.
I have always loved the Nutcracker, especially at the holidays, and have realized over the years a lot of that is the uncanniness of the entire package that resonates: inanimate objects coming to life, evil mice scuttling in corners and twilight dreamtime that slips in and out of reality. Even the three syllable name of the protagonist; Nut-crac-ker, ta-ta-ta, those three syllables seem obsessively repeated throughout so many of the main themes in the score by Tchaikovsky:
(March: ta, ta-ta-ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, taaaaaaaa….ta, ta-ta-ta, ta, ta, ta ,ta, taaaaaa)
Talk about obsessive repetition: musicians love to joke and groan about how many myriad Nutcrackers they have to endure playing at this time of year….I confess, I miss playing it since most ballet venues downsized to audiotape/CD. I never got sick of playing it at any time. It is a wind player’s dream, but there is something for everyone in the score. I admit, there are a few tiny weaker spots than others in the entire ballet, but on whole the music is airtight and ageless. It has even survived countless inane movie scores that, over and over and OVER again, use and abuse theTrepak to accompany a frenzied Christmas shopping spree or commercials hawking Mercedes or Lexuses (Lexi?) to the magical Sugar Plum Fairy celeste.
ETA Hoffmann, who wrote the original story, returns to his usual themes of obsessive repetition, inanimate objects coming to life and scary one-eyed characters. Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, who occasionally veers over the top into the melodramatic, saccharine and swooningly romantic in his symphonic writing, here unfailingly has a pitch-perfect feel for orchestrating Hoffmann’s slightly nightmarish tale and balancing out the Tim Burtonesque elements of grotesqueness with his own warm harmonic language and glorious melodies: heimlich with unheimlich. It is a partnering that works supernaturally well.
After watching several versions of the Nutcracker on DVD or PBS over the past few years, I realize that I don’t care as much for companies that portray Clara as an adult or older teenager (Baryshnikov/Kirkland, etc.) to make the Nutcracker Prince/Clara relationship into an acceptable adult relationship, or somehow restage the action to make her magically transmute into one of the sugar plum fairies, etc. so that she can join in the action. They are beautifully and artfully danced, but miss the point of the story to me. On the other hand, the productions whose staging play up the creepiness of the Drosselmayer/pre-pubescent Clara interactions seem equally, if not more cringeworthy. This is what Tchaikovsky’s music mitigates; the nobility and lightness of the score is a counterweight to the darkness of Hoffmann’s overly Freudian overtones; it heightens the sense of awe and an abundance of innocent wonder in the listener.
The very magic of a childlike (as opposed to childish) faith and belief that things like malevolent mice, ballerina dolls, jack-in-the-boxes and Nutcrackers could be alive somehow becomes distanced if things like this actually occur on stage as reality, including children morphing into adults, although perhaps one of our most ardent wishes as children. I think we all harbor deep within us the memory of that fervent magical wish from childhood still, and it is most touchingly believable when artfully embodied in the Nutcracker by a real child protagonist who is doing the dreaming or imagining. For the same reason that our adult dreams often symbolically mask our darker wishes and fears that often stem from childhood, Clara’s dreams seem most likely to strike a hidden magical chord within us when they reflect her childlike nature at the same time she is beginning to enter into the all too real adult world. I also think that is also why the Suite has been the most enduringly popular part of the Nutcracker ballet: sans any pas-de-deux, it is less concerned with the romance aspect of the story and more with the fantasy world that Clara (and we) imagine. She is still a child and dreams of candy, but is also on the cusp, ready to grow up in her own time and at her own speed from watching and learning of the world dancing around her.
