It made its debut, with gratifying success, in a concert performance of a suite from the ballet in March 1892, several months before the full ballet was premiered. ![]() This was the very instrument he needed to create a musical signature for the sugar Plum Fairy! Tchaikovsky calculated that the ‘glistening’ tones (as he described them) of this bell-like keyboard instrument would arouse a sensation – if only he could introduce them to Russian audiences ahead of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov! It was, therefore, with the strictest secrecy that he brought his celesta back to Russia. Despite his misgivings, however, he persevered and came eventually to pour into this last great ballet some of his most enchanting and delicate music.Įver child-like in his fascination with an exotic idea or an unusual sound, Tchaikovsky was seized with enthusiasm when, on a visit to Paris, he discovered the celesta. ![]() He had no doubt in June 1891 that The Nutcracker was definitely inferior to The Sleeping Beauty. The choreographer, Marius Petipa, provided the composer with a scenario so explicit in terms of metre, dynamics, and the number of bars required in each section that Tchaikovsky, feeling not only strait-jacketed by such demands by dispirited by the flimsy and unstructured story of the ballet, was inclined to abandon the project. It was commissioned, like Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty before it, by the Imperial Theatres of Russia and was intended for production at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Tchaikovsky was not, in fact, enthusiastic about The Nutcracker.
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