I have read a lot of Christmas and holiday-themed stories to children over the years at school. I feel as though I can safely say that the vast majority of stories I read aloud all had a feel-good air about them. As such, they were enjoyed by my students. I include popular stories such as The Polar Express and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas in this group. However, one famous story that always elicited a mixed reaction from students was The Nutcracker. Right from the very beginning of the story, there is a sense of excitement mixed with foreboding as the two children, Fritz and Marie Stahlbaum, await the arrival of their godfather, Herr Drosselmeyer. He is painted as a mysterious figure before we ever get to meet him in the story. From that point on, the world of dreams and nightmares intermingle as clockwork soldiers spring to life and battle an army of mice led by a seven-headed mouse king. With the battle eventually coming to an end, Marie is whisked away to the Land of Dolls, where she beholds the famous “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, among other things, before waking up at home with seven tiny crowns in her pocket and a story that her family all declare never happened and is all in her head. The Nutcracker is one of those rare stories read at Christmas time that features neither Santa Claus nor the Baby Jesus. The Nutcracker may happen at Christmas time, but truth be told, it has more in common with gothic tales by The Brothers Grimm than it does with Santa. Before we discuss how The Nutcracker became such a staple of the Christmas season, we must first go back in time to learn about the man whose science fiction-tinged horror stories inspired it. That man was an underrated Prussian writer named E.T.A. Hoffmann.
E.T.A. Hoffmann was one of the world’s first great science fiction writers. He was of Prussian descent. For much of his young adult life, Hoffmann was a resident of Berlin, Germany. He loved the artistic feel of this cosmopolitan city. Eventually, he was conscripted into the Prussian military. The rigid structure of such an organization did not mesh with his eccentric personality. At one point, Hoffmann got himself into trouble for creating a story about his superior officers which included caricatures that ridiculed these men. This episode got Hoffmann exiled to a small outpost in Poland. Being banished from the bohemian lifestyle he had grown accustomed to in Berlin caused Hoffman to retreat inward into his own mind. This new behaviour manifested itself in the form of a passion for writing. One of the first books that Hoffmann published was a dark story called Der Sandmann, or The Sandman. As you may know, there is a children’s legend that says a character known as The Sandman comes to visit sleepy children at night in order to help them fall asleep. He does this by throwing sand in their eyes. I don’t know about you, but I always had always heard mention of The Sandman coming when I was young and never really thought anything of it. It was just something my mother said to get me to go to sleep. But, when you stop and think about it, what kind of weird story was this, anyway?! It must have seemed strange to Hoffmann back in the early 1800s as well. His story of Der Sandmann features a character called The Sandman (who also has a normal human name and form), who visits children at night and steals their eyes to feed to his own young offspring, who live at his lair. In this story, a boy named Nathaniel thinks that he has witnessed the death of his father at the hands of The Sandman. The father was killed protecting his son, Nathaniel. However, all who hear Nathaniel’s story declare the tale to be solely in his mind. Thus starts a story-long plot theme of the reader never knowing for sure if Nathaniel is actually seeing what he is seeing or else if he has gone mad. In the course of the story, we also meet two characters called Clara and Lothar, who are brother and sister. Nathaniel falls in love with Clara but has so many episodes of mental instability that she separates from him. At one point, Nathaniel buys a spyglass (telescope) from a mysterious man who turns out to be The Sandman in human form. Through this telescope, Nathaniel spots a woman named Olympia. He falls instantly in love with her, even though all others find her odd and repellent. As it turns out, Olympia is a clockwork woman, although Nathaniel is never able to see that for himself. One thing leads to another, and Nathaniel attacks a scientist who helped create Olympia and is sent to an asylum. In time, he is released and reunites with Clara in hopes of marrying her and living a normal life. However, The Sandman has other ideas and tricks Nathaniel into looking through the spyglass again. This time, Nathaniel sees Clara and hears people chanting something that speaks of eyes. This causes Nathaniel to go mad for the final time as he jumps off of a high tower to his death. The story ends a few decades later with a scene that shows Clara living a peaceful, contented, bucolic life with a quiet older man who may or may not actually be The Sandman in human form. The story ends without us ever knowing if Clara survives or not and if her husband is The Sandman in human form or not.
Der Sandmann created quite a stir in its day. Speaking so vividly as it does of mental illness and of artificial intelligence (clockwork characters who seemed so realistic as to fool real humans into thinking that the robots were human, too), this story catapulted Hoffmann to fame as a writer of a new genre known as science fiction (which is, quite literally, the blending of science and fiction to create new stories). Famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote an entire book called The Uncanny based on Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. In his book, Freud viewed Hoffmann’s fixation on eyes and having them stolen as symbolizing castration and a loss of sexual identity in an ever changing world. While castration may have nothing to do with “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, it does set up the fact that the literary world was all abuzz with anticipation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s next work. Two years after publishing Der Sandmann, Hoffman published a two-volume set of short stories called The Serapion Brothers. The final story in Volume No.1 was called “Nutcracker and Mouse King”. It was this short story that caught the eye of French writer Alexandre Dumas several decades later, causing him to adapt it into the story that we know today and upon which Pytor Illyich Tchaikovsky based his ballet, The Nutcracker.
Hoffmann’s short story contains enough familiar elements that you will recognize the story that you know as The Nutcracker while I go through this paragraph. But having said that, there are marked differences, too. Overall, Hoffmann’s interest in blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, imagination and madness, dreams and nightmares shines through and forms the basis of his short story. In addition, his fascination with artificial intelligence in the form of robots and mechanical entities that assume human form is clearly present as well. Hoffmann’s story of “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” begins as you would expect…The Stahlbaum children await the visit of their godfather, Herr Drosselmeyer. He brings them many gifts, including a nutcracker doll. While trying to use it to crack nuts, Fritz breaks the nutcracker’s jaw. His sister Marie is distraught and cries because she believes her brother has caused the nutcracker to feel pain. Herr Drosselmeyer assures Marie that he can mend the nutcracker’s jaw and takes it with him to his workshop. Meanwhile, Marie has a fitful sleep. She dreams of seeing Herr Drosselmeyer in strange places, including atop her family’s grandfather clock. As she dreams this, mice swarm into the living room led by the seven-headed Mouse King. Toy soldiers spring to life and a great battle ensues. In the end, the Mouse King is killed with Marie’s help, and his seven crowns are given to her. In the morning, no one in her family believes her. In the afternoon, Herr Drosselmeyer returns with a fully repaired nutcracker under his arm. Marie is delighted and swears that she can see life stirring in the nutcracker’s painted face.
However, one of the key differences in Hoffmann’s story from the version we know today concerns the inclusion of the Mouse King’s origin story. This origin story explains why the Mouse King has come to be so upset as to be threatening Marie and why Herr Drosselmeyer gave the gift of a nutcracker in the first place.
The mysterious Herr Drosselmeyer takes Marie aside and tells her a story of a princess named Pirlipat and a mouse named Mouserinks who was also known as the Queen of Mice. Herr Drosselmeyer’s tale forms the remainder of Hoffmann’s short story. To summarize Herr Drosselmeyer, The Mouse Queen tricked Princess Pirlipat and her mother into eating the ingredients to be used for the king’s supper. In a rage, the king demands that the Mouse Queen and all her children be caught and killed. Herr Drosselmeyer is the person who creates the traps. Almost all of the mouse children are eventually killed. The Mouse Queen declares that vengeance will be sought against those responsible in the form of a spell that will cause Princess Pirlipat’s beloved to assume an ugly, grotesque form. Long story short, a young man who was able to solve a magical riddle and crack a special nut with his own teeth comes into the castle. He is handsome and is promised Princess Pirlipat’s hand in marriage. However, the handsome young man is tripped by the Mouse Queen before he can take seven human steps (thus failing to fulfill a special prophecy). As he falls, the Mouse Queen’s curse is launched, and he assumes the form of a nutcracker doll, but on the scale of a human man. Seeing this, Princess Pirlipat renounces her love. The Mouse Queen laughs and claims victory of sorts.
We now return to the present. Marie has dreams that she is visited by the son of the Mouse Queen…the new Mouse King. In these dreams, the Mouse King is threatening to harm her if she does not give him her dolls and other things that she considers precious. The Mouse King returns night after night, always demanding more and more from Marie. Eventually, the nutcracker comes and asks for a sword. Marie gives him one. He kills the Mouse King and takes Marie to the Land of the Dolls. Marie attempts to tell her family what has happened, but no one believes her.
Then, one day Marie informs Herr Drosselmeyer of what has happened. She tells Herr Drosselmeyer that she would never have treated the handsome young man the way that Princess Pirlipat did. After hearing those words, Herr Drosselmeyer smiles. The doorbell rings, and Drosselmeyer’s handsome young nephew arrives and is brought into the parlor. He informs Marie that he was the nutcracker all along and that her declaration that she would have treated the grotesque nutcracker differently has broken the spell that he was under. He has come to marry her. In a few years when Marie has “come of age”, they settle in the Land of the Dolls, where they live happily ever after.
What is a dream and what is real? It is hard to tell at times in Hoffmann’s story. The many deaths and battles and curses that the story contains, along with the number of times inanimate objects spring to life, all give Hoffmann’s story a dark emotional tone. When this story was selected for adaptation for a ballet, it was felt that some of the darkness had to be removed, and some of the story-within-a-story plot elements had to be simplified. French writer Alexandre Dumas created the adaptation that formed the story we are most familiar with today. It is the version that Tchaikovsky used to create his Nutcracker ballet in the early 1900s. While the ballet still contains important aspects of Hoffmann’s story, Tchaikovsky added music and dance sequences that brightened its tone and made the story more appealing to general audiences. In fact, prior to releasing the full ballet, along with its complete score, Tchaikovsky gave audiences a sneak preview of what was to come by performing a section of the score that has become known as The Nutcracker Suite. This shortened set of musical compositions came to be something of a “greatest hits” compilation from the ballet. The pieces included in the suite include dances called “The Arabian Dance”, “The Chinese Dance” and, of course, “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, along with several others, too. The Nutcracker Suite became so popular that it was selected almost intact for inclusion in Walt Disney’s famous experiment that took animation and paired it with classical music that he called Fantasia. *(You can read a previously written post about Fantasia here). But many will agree that from The Nutcracker Suite, the most enduringly popular composition is “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”. The distinctive opening notes were created by the use of an instrument that had just recently been invented and had never been used before in public called a celesta. A celesta is an instrument that looks and functions like a piano but makes the sound of bells as it is played. “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and the use of the celesta both created enthusiastic responses with audiences at the time. This caused the unfortunate effect of making the full ballet seem long and confusing in comparison. Because of the disparity in reactions between the suite and the full ballet, Tchaikovsky stopped performing the suite altogether for a while until audiences adjusted to the experience of sitting through the full ballet. In time, as we now know, The Nutcracker ballet is well regarded all over the world and has become a holiday tradition for many families.
Knowing the story of how The Nutcracker came to be allows me to better understand the construction of the plotline and why the story can be somewhat off-putting for young listeners. It also shows how much ahead of his time the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann actually was. He was writing about the dangers of robots in human form, A.I. and about mental illness over two centuries ago. He saw the future then, and now it is the history of his work that allows us to better understand the present. At the end of the day, the very nature of our humanity is most fragile. The moral of this post is to state that The Nutcracker is not a Christmas story at all. It is a work of science fiction set during the holidays that has an important message for us all, provided that we don’t allow ourselves to become hypnotized by that dancing sugar plum fairy. It is still a good story. Perhaps one day I will even go and watch the ballet. But for now, I think I will get my Nutcracker fix through Fantasia, thank you very much.
The link to the video for “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from The Nutcracker Ballet by Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky can be found here.
The link to the official website for The Nutcracker Ballet can be found here.
The link to the official website for Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky can be found here.
The link to the official website for writer E.T.A. Hoffmann can be found here.
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