To understand this shadow, one must first understand its author. Hoffmann was not merely a writer. He was a composer, a conductor, and the critic who invented the very concept of “Romantic music.” When Tchaikovsky set his tale to ballet, he wasn’t translating a text—he was engaging with another musician.
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Hoffmann, or Music as the Art of the Ineffable
In 1810, six years before writing Nussknacker und Mausekönig [“The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”], Hoffmann published an essay in leading German music journal the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung which would transform European musical thought: his review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This text was the longest ever devoted to a Beethoven work at that time and transcended mere criticism to propose a full-fledged theory of musical Romanticism.
For Hoffmann, instrumental music was “the most Romantic of all arts—one might almost say the only purely Romantic one—for its sole subject is the infinite.” Beethoven was its prophet: his music “sets in motion terror, fear, horror, pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of Romanticism.”
Hoffmann was no armchair theorist. He had changed his middle name from Wilhelm to Amadeus in devotion to Mozart. During his tenure as music director and conductor of the Bamberg Theatre, he composed some ten operas, a symphony, and sacred music. Years later, his opera Undine premiered in Berlin in 1816 (the same year as the Nutcracker tale) and impressed Carl Maria von Weber enough for him to publicly praise its “swift dramatic action” and “use of recurring motifs.” Hoffmann was anticipating Wagnerian leitmotifs by several decades.
The fire that destroyed Berlin’s Schauspielhaus theater after the twenty-fifth performance took down the sets and scores, as well as Hoffmann’s ambitions as a composer. In the aftermath, he resolved to devote himself entirely to writing, yet his tales remained haunted by the conviction that certain truths can only be expressed in music.
Nussknacker und Mausekönig bears this imprint. The tale is not a children’s story. Marie does not “dream” the Kingdom of Sweets—she believes in it so deeply that the adults worry about her sanity. The Mouse King is a truly terrifying seven-headed creature, born of a cruel revenge story: the embedded tale of Princess Pirlipat, where a mouse queen curses an entire kingdom after her family is slaughtered to protect some bacon fat. This story-within-the-story, which no choreographic adaptation has ever retained, occupies a third of the original tale. The ending, too, remains open. Does Marie vanish into another world? Into madness? The text refuses to decide.
What the Ballet Abandons and What Music Reclaims
Alexandre Dumas adapted the tale in 1844, clarifying the plot and softening the tale. It was this version and not the original that Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov would bring to the stage in 1892. The libretto made radical cuts: the Pirlipat story disappeared, the psychological ambiguity evaporated, and Clara became a well-behaved child having a pleasant dream. The ending wrapped up neatly.
Petipa sent Tchaikovsky maniacally precise instructions including tempo, character, and exact number of bars for each number. The composer, who disliked this subordination (“I am merely a supplier of music,” he wrote bitterly), complied nonetheless.
He was also grieving. In April 1891, his beloved sister Alexandra had died. Just weeks later, Tchaikovsky was in New York conducting the inaugural concert at Carnegie Hall. He composed The Nutcracker in this strange twilight, caught between public triumph and private mourning. Perhaps this explains the shadow lurking beneath the score: not quite melancholy, but something the Russians call toska. Nabokov said the word was untranslatable—”a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for.” The music aches for innocence, for a love as uncomplicated as Clara’s devotion to her wooden prince, even as it knows such simplicity is only ever a dream.
Tchaikovsky, however, did more than comply with Petipa’s demands. He transformed these constraints into opportunities.
The question was vertiginous. How could a ballet—an art of the visible, the corporeal—honor an aesthetic that proclaimed music alone capable of reaching the ineffable? How do you dance the infinite?
The paradox is striking. Hoffmann had declared instrumental music supreme precisely because it escaped the body, the visible, and the narrative. His tale, nonetheless, now found itself transformed into the most corporeal of arts. Tchaikovsky’s solution was to split the labor: let the dancers tell the softened story and let the orchestra carry what words and bodies cannot.
Take the transformation scene, when the Christmas tree grows and the night turns menacing. The libretto merely indicates a scene change, but the orchestra tells another story: the strings climb chromatically, the harmony slips away, and the key slides from B-flat major (the bourgeois reality of the overture) toward E major (the realm of wonder). These two keys stand at opposite ends of the circle of fifths—the musical equivalent of violet and yellow on a color wheel. Tchaikovsky doesn’t so much describe a dream as tip us into another state of consciousness.
Next time you hear this scene, listen for the moment when the strings begin their chromatic ascent. That faint unease beneath the wonder? That’s Hoffmann, speaking through Tchaikovsky’s orchestra.
Drosselmeyer’s entrance, earlier in the act, is equally revealing. The libretto makes him an eccentric uncle but the orchestra turns him into a figure of ambiguity. Tubas, trombones, muted horns, and violas in the low register create a deliberately strange combination, neither quite menacing nor quite reassuring. This is the Hoffmannesque portrait par excellence: the uncanny translated into timbre.
If Drosselmeyer lives in orchestral shadow, the Sugar Plum Fairy emerges in crystalline light. Tchaikovsky discovered the celesta in Paris in 1891, at the Mustel workshop. He immediately wrote to his publisher Jurgenson, “I want you to buy this instrument… but show it to no one, for I fear Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov will get hold of it before me.” The Sugar Plum Fairy is born from this timbre, “something between a small piano and a glockenspiel,” in the composer’s own words. For the first time in ballet history, a character had been defined not by a melodic theme but by a pure instrumental color. Petipa had asked for a dance that would sound “like drops of water shooting from a fountain” and Tchaikovsky gave him a fountain of crystal.
Act II poses an obvious dramaturgical problem: nothing happens, Clara simply watches dances. It is a “costumed concert.” Tchaikovsky turns this weakness into an opportunity. Each national dance becomes a miniature orchestral portrait: the Arabian Dance with its languorous chromaticism and drone bass (actually a Georgian lullaby, evoking an Orient imagined from afar, as nineteenth-century composers so often did); the Chinese Dance with its flutes in the upper register; and the Trepak, where Tchaikovsky is finally at home, all raw energy and the only authentically Russian dance—this is the moment when the ballet stops being about “somewhere else” and finally comes home.
The masterstroke is the Waltz of the Snowflakes. This scene doesn’t exist in Hoffmann, barely in Dumas. Entirely Tchaikovsky’s creation, it is perhaps the ballet’s most Hoffmannesque moment: a children’s choir sings wordlessly, disembodied voices in the storm. Here music achieves what Hoffmann theorized, reaching a realm beyond language, a threshold between two worlds where meaning dissolves into sound.
What Interpretation Reveals
All of this—Hoffmann’s shadow, Tchaikovsky’s alchemy—lives or dies in performance. If you’ve ever sensed that The Nutcracker is somehow more than Christmas entertainment, that there’s something strange beneath the sugarcoating, a shiver under the sparkle, you’ve felt Tchaikovsky’s Hoffmann. The conductor decides whether you get just the sugar or also the strangeness.
Several traditions exist today. Some productions seek to recapture the spirit of Petipa and Ivanov, that organic fusion where choreography is born from music, where every orchestral accent finds its gesture. Others privilege narrative clarity or visual spectacle: the plot is explained, motivations are clarified, comic elements are added… The result can be charming, but one sometimes “hears” less of the music.
Nothing reveals an interpretation more clearly than the choice of tempi. Sergiu Celibidache, whose recordings with the London Philharmonic (1948) and the Munich Philharmonic remain benchmarks for connoisseurs, adopted some of the slowest tempi ever recorded. Yet his versions are described as “a constant delight,” revealing details “never heard before.” The miracle, one critic noted, is that “his performances may be slow but remain very taut, with devastating climaxes that are built and earned.” Slowness becomes a magnifying glass. It doesn’t dilute the drama; it reveals its architecture.
The great Russian conductors (Boris Khaikin, Vladimir Fedoseyev, or Gennady Rozhdestvensky) never maintain a constant tempo for more than a few bars. Every phrase breathes, accelerates, or holds back, but always acts in service of meaning. This is not arbitrary freedom; it’s musical rhetoric. When that rhetoric is lost, when rubato decorates the surface without serving the structure, the music stops telling its story.
What Each Era Chooses to Hear
Hoffmann invested his tale with his Romantic obsessions: the double, madness, and the eruption of the strange into the everyday. The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, via Dumas then Petipa, softened the tale. Tchaikovsky, through the orchestra, reinjected the unease. The twentieth century often made it a glittering Christmas spectacle, a machine for tidy dreams.
The twentieth century also produced one of the most audacious transformations of the score. In 1960, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn recorded their own reinvention of the piece with Nutcracker Suite. Tchaikovsky’s piping flutes become saxophones in close alternation; the Sugar Plum Fairy’s celesta gives way to a cool, swinging piano; and the Trepak’s raw energy turns into the bounding “Volga Vouty”. What Ellington and Strayhorn understood, intuitively, is what the great classical interpreters also know: that this music breathes, and that breathing can take many forms. Their version doesn’t betray Tchaikovsky, it converses with him, just as Tchaikovsky once conversed with Hoffmann.
The twenty-first century reinvents further still. At the Comédie-Française, Johanna Boyé’s new theatrical adaptation poses an unexpected question: “What if the Nutcracker refused to go to war?” The Pirlipat story returns, transformed: warring parties settle their differences in a “talk-it-out box” rather than through extermination. In a world where conflicts drag on and leaders refuse to speak, the allusion needs no explaining.
This may be the ultimate proof of the tale’s vitality: it withstands every metamorphosis because it asks questions that never age. How do we cross the threshold between childhood and adulthood? What remains of our wounds? Can we choose the dream without tipping into madness?
Tchaikovsky, who was not particularly fond of this ballet, nonetheless created a score that transcends the story. It is there, in that threshold between the visible and the audible, between text and sound, that his music meets Hoffmann’s. Not in the literal tale, but in its deepest project: an art where wonder is never quite reassuring, where beauty unsettles as much as it enchants.
