For the ballet, Tchaikovsky would again join forces with Marius Petipa, with whom he had collaborated on The Sleeping Beauty.

8.3 Pletnev: Concert suite from The Nutcracker, for solo pianoĪfter the success of The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the Imperial Theatres, commissioned Tchaikovsky to compose a double-bill program featuring both an opera and a ballet.8.2 Grainger: Paraphrase on Tchaikovsky's Flower Waltz, for solo piano.8.1 Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker Suite, Op.7.1 From the Imperial Ballet's 1892 program.Among other things, the score is noted for its use of the celesta, an instrument that the composer had already employed in his much lesser known symphonic ballad The Voyevoda (1891). Tchaikovsky's score has become one of his most famous compositions. The ballet's score has been used in several film adaptations of Hoffmann's story. Major American ballet companies generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenues from performances of The Nutcracker.

The complete Nutcracker has enjoyed enormous popularity since the late 1960s and is now performed by countless ballet companies, primarily during the Christmas season, especially in North America. Hoffmann's 1816 short story ' The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'.Īlthough the original production was not a success, the 20-minute suite that Tchaikovsky extracted from the ballet was.

info)) is an 1892 two-act ballet (' fairy ballet' Russian: балет-феерия, balet-feyeriya), originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Op.

The nutcracker ballet royal opera house