Hello my Lovely readers, and for the holiday I am writing about my favorite Yuletide show. This will be a very brief overview of the show. The ballet about a little girl and her magical toy nutcracker has delighted audiences for over a century. It has been performed yearly every December in New York since the 1950s!
This amazing ballet tells the story of Clara and her toy Nutcracker at Christmas. She is gifted this Nutcracker and then as the show goes on she dances her way through a magical land. In the magical land she encounters an evil villain known as the Mouse King! The Nutcracker must come to save Clara from the Mouse King.
The music for this ballet was composed by the iconic Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He is also the man that composed Swan Lake, and my favorite ballet, Sleeping Beauty! It was a great idea to do a Yuletide themed ballet, and it was inspired to find a story that had magical and faery elements. A common theme for ballets was to have them tell the story of a famous fairytale. We see this in Tchaikovsky’s other two shows, and many other iconic ballets by other composers share this theme.
The story was taken from an E.T.A. Hoffman story, and that story also would inspire Alexandre Dumas’ story of the same name! This story is one that will never be forgotten during the Holiday Season with its popularity of performance each year! I hope you have enjoyed this brief post. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Further Reading
- The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffman
- The Story of a Nutcracker by Alexandre Dumas
White Rose of Avalon 