NUTCRACKER & THE MUSIC OF TCHAIKOVSKY

After the pair had worked together on The Sleeping Beauty, the choreographer Marius Petipa worked with Tchaikovsky to write the music for a new scenario he had chosen and written out, based on a version by Alexandre Dumas of Hoffmann’s story. Petipa instructed Tchaikovsky down to the last detail, including the tempo and the number of bars in each section.

What has always struck people about Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite is the astonishing sounds the composer gets from the orchestra – he brings the toys and sweets to life in music that somehow sounds like glittering cut-glass, crystallized ginger, and spun sugar. One innovation was Tchaikovsky’s use of the celesta, the instrument you hear in the ‘Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy’ (Petipa said he wanted this dance to sound “like drops of water shooting from a fountain”). The celesta is a keyboard instrument whose hammers hit metal plates, sounding similar to but softer than a glockenspiel; Tchaikovsky had heard one in Paris in 1891 and asked his publisher to buy one, hoping to keep it a secret so that no other Russian would compose music for the instrument before him.

Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite begins with an ‘Overture’ and ‘March’ before moving into dances from Act 2 of the ballet, which is set in the Land of Sweets. After the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’s’ dance, we have ‘Russian,’ ‘Arabian,’ ‘Chinese,’ and ‘Reed Flute’ dances – though the ‘Arabian’ one (which Rattle calls “absolutely heartbreaking – how the strings and oboe and cor anglais sing out over it”) is actually based on a Georgian cradle song. The Nutcracker Suite concludes with the famous ‘Waltz Of The Flowers’ evoking elegance and grandeur.

Most of the dances have a couple of ‘verses’ that use the same tune, just orchestrated differently. Notice how Tchaikovsky keeps the sound crystalline and transparent when he uses the whole orchestra, as when there are just a couple of flutes playing.

https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-features/tchaikovsky-nutcracker-suite/