The Nutcracker
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The Nutcracker, Op. 71, is an 1892 two-act classical ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child's imagination featuring a Nutcracker doll. The
(Left to right) Lydia Rubtsova as Marianna, Stanislava Belinskaya as Clara and Vassily Stukolkin as Fritz, in the original production of The Nutcracker (Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, 1892)
Varvara Nikitina as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Pavel Gerdt as the Cavalier, in a later performance in the original run of The Nutcracker, 1892
Olga Preobrajenska as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Nikolai Legat as Prince Coqueluche in the Grand pas de deux in the original production of The Nutcracker. Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, c. 1900
Ivan Vsevolozhsky's original costume sketch for The Nutcracker (1892)
"The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", also simply known as "The Nutcracker", is a literary fairy tale from 1816 by the German author E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which a young girl's favorite Christmas toy, t
The Nutcracker
…The plot is an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's 1844 short story The Tale of a Nutcracker, itself a retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The ballet's first choreographer was Marius Petipa, with whom Tchaikovsky had worked three years earlier on The Sleeping Beauty, assisted by Lev Ivanov…
Title page with Hoffmann's own illustration in Kinder-Mährchen, 1816
An illustration from the 1853 U.S. edition by D. Appleton, New York.
A variety of traditional nutcracker figures
Title page of the first edition of Kinder-Mährchen