December 18 - World Premiere of The Nutcracker

Posted on December 18, 2021

Key Points

This is an update of my post published on December 18, 2010:

On this day in 1892, the now-famous ballet The Nutcracker was performed for the first time. It was performed at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia. (St. Petersburg has also been called Petrograd and Leningrad. The name is often shortened to Petersburg or even Piter.)

The composer chosen to create the music for the ballet, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was given a simplified story about a girl who gets a nutcracker doll for Christmas.

After she goes to sleep, she hears something and either wakes up to see – or watches in a dream – as the nutcracker and some other toys fight an army of mice. When she helps her nutcracker win the fight by throwing a slipper at the Mouse King, the nutcracker is transformed into a prince and whisks the girl off to the magical Land of Sweets.

The Land of Sweets has been imagined and re-imagined by
many different artists, for paintings and book illustrations…

…and for stage sets.

Tchaikovsky was given a lot of structure for the ballet that he was asked to create—the composition of each number, including the tempo and length, were set out for him. Tchaikovsky was not eager to work with all those constraints. Yet he managed to create arguably the most popular and enduring of his works!

The reception of this first performance was a bit mixed. Most critics were pretty harsh about the dancing and choreography, yet most were positive about Tchaikovsky’s music. It probably would have shocked the more negative critics if they could have known how many times this ballet would be performed and filmed and watched and enjoyed all over the world—especially in the U.S. from the 1950s on.

This Nutcracker was staged in Beijing, China.

Celebrate The Nutcracker:

Watch it. My kids loved the ballet danced by Mikhail Baryshnikov, which was filmed for television. Many other versions are available on video, including the ballet on ice and the story as an animated feature (with no dancing).

Also, part of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” was used for one of my favorite segments of the animated Disney classic Fantasia. So you could watch that movie, as well.

You can find lots of bits and pieces of the ballet on YouTube. For example, here is one version of the Chinese Tea dance. And here is another version – this time with three dancers – and here is a third version – this time with lots of dancers!