The Nutcracker

Today, after our group meeting, I went to Place des Arts with friends to see The Nutcracker, a ballet I had been longing to see for ages. The Nutcracker is my favorite music, bar none. The first reason, of course, is that Tchaikovsky is simply phenomenal; the second is that it was the music that first awakened me to music, back in my elementary-school music class—thank you, Teacher Wang. Every time I listen to The Nutcracker, it takes me a long while to calm down again, as if I had traveled through time and space. When I’m doing some fairly tedious work, I like to listen to ballet music—Coppélia, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, Swan Lake—but The Nutcracker is the one I almost never put on, because it always sets my body and soul resonating, and then I can’t concentrate.

Especially the Waltz of the Flowers. After elementary school I never (deliberately) listened to The Nutcracker again, yet the melody of the Waltz of the Flowers stayed engraved in my mind. For a long time I would catch myself humming its lilting strains without even meaning to. Once, in middle school, on a whim, I set out to find it, and the scene is still vivid to me today: I thought it was part of Swan Lake, so I was sitting at the computer playing Swan Lake when my dad walked over and joked, “Oh? Since when do you listen to classical music? How highbrow!” For some reason I was too embarrassed to say I was hunting for that piece, so I fobbed him off with “I just suddenly felt like listening to Swan Lake.”

On a summer night in 2021, unable to stand the itch any longer, I resolved to set out on the search once more. I sprawled on my bed with a book in front of me and my headphones on, and once again started with Swan Lake. That night, reading as I listened, I heard all two and a half hours of Swan Lake for the first time, almost without noticing. No luck. This time I didn’t give up; I kept going. And I was lucky: my second try was The Nutcracker. I had been listening for only a little while when I could tell from the style alone that what I was looking for had to be part of this! I listened on, my heart surging, and discovered to my astonishment how many snatches of music I had heard before were hidden in The Nutcracker: the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy was the bell for morning reading in middle school; the Chinese Dance was a level in Piano Tiles 2; the Russian Dance (Trepak) was the official soundtrack of every kind of celebration. Others—the Overture, the March, the Dance of the Reed Flutes—were all familiar tunes too. A real treasure trove.

After a somewhat anxious wait, in the second act I finally heard the opening of the Waltz of the Flowers, and my heart skipped a beat. The soft notes slowly caressed my eardrums, unhurried and unflustered, and yet they passed through my whole body in just the right way, flowed through my blood, and landed with a thud in the depths of my heart. Even though I knew it all by heart and could predict every next note precisely, when the melody actually rang out in my head I still couldn’t believe it. It was probably something like what the crew of the Blue Space felt when they first entered four-dimensional space in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy: my mind was so overwhelmed by the music’s endless detail that it simply crashed. It was a breathtaking beauty. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the music theory I once knew so well from my piano lessons; but I am also fortunate, because great music can speak directly to the soul, with no need for knowledge as a go-between.

From then on, The Nutcracker became my personal soundtrack. Washing the dishes, mopping the floor, doing chores; driving alone from home to the hospital, sighing in the evening rush-hour traffic; trying to find my way out of Nanjing’s maze of no-left-turn streets… On planes, to fight the noise; at Christmas far from home, to fight the loneliness. At Christmas 2021, I watched the Bolshoi Theatre’s Nutcracker all the way through on Bilibili for the first time. Once I knew the story, my understanding of The Nutcracker deepened by another layer. This time, when I heard the final pas de deux, I suddenly realized that this melody—rich and tender, witness to the wedding of Clara and the Prince, beauty at its utmost—is also veiled in a faint, barely perceptible sorrow. It is as if the dreamer, on the verge of waking, has already realized she is dreaming. The dream is so real, so happy, that she does not want to wake; but all the loveliness before her eyes is mere mist and illusion, and at some moment yet to come it will vanish, irretrievably. I imagine that on stage, as the music ends, the face behind Clara’s white bridal veil must already be streaming with tears, happy and yet sad. Yes: the whole of The Nutcracker is the dream Clara has on Christmas Eve, after falling asleep under the Christmas tree with her nutcracker doll in her arms. The handsome prince, the sprites of the Land of Snow, the ball in the Kingdom of Sweets, sweet love—all of it is nothing but a fleeting dream. In the music she becomes the Sugar Plum Fairy, leaping across nimble notes; in reality she is just a little girl in her nightgown. It truly was the best Christmas present she could have had—and mine too. Carried along the river of the music, I too seemed to enter my own dream: I was back in elementary school, in the line of children doing our silly little dance to the March from The Nutcracker in the music room; back in that sensitive childhood where sorrow and joy were all mixed together.

Seen from this angle, the version I saw tonight by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens—an adaptation of the story, or rather, another reading of it—takes the tragedy out of The Nutcracker. In tonight’s production, Clara was played by an adorable little girl who looked only eleven or twelve. I was startled at first: Clara is the center of the whole ballet, after all, with so many intricate steps, and the technical and physical demands are no joke—the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in particular is a fiendishly difficult passage, surely too much for a little girl. But I soon realized that in this Nutcracker, Clara and the Prince are merely a prelude to the story; her biggest part is sitting with the Prince in an armchair at the very back of the stage, beaming as she watches the sprites dance. The Sugar Plum Fairy and the other roles are danced by adult dancers instead. And so the whole story turns from Clara’s sorrowful dream into Clara’s adventure in another world. At the end of the music, Clara climbs, smiling, into a fairy carriage and returns happily to reality. By contrast, in the Bolshoi version, when Clara wakes beneath the Christmas tree at the end, she raises her hands into the air with a look of helpless resignation, as if trying to catch hold of the happiness slipping away from her. I rather like this de-tragedizing: it keeps the bright side of the music and helps the audience focus on the beauty of the music itself. Besides, most of the audience are children anyway, so there’s probably no need to get so profound—Christmas Eve is meant to be fun for the whole family.

Another stunning thing tonight was the set design. As the story unfolded, three layers of curtain were lifted one after another: the first, as we moved from the street scene with everyone out and about to the Christmas party indoors, rose to reveal a grand, lavishly decorated living room; the second unveiled the Christmas tree; and the third came after we entered the dream world. In the end I was amazed at how deep the stage actually was. Besides that, the dry-ice mist drifting over the floor made the opening of the second act feel like heaven itself. The toy soldiers’ cannon fired—of all things—balloons, ha ha. And there were plenty of other nice details, like the projections on the floor of the Land of Snow being shaped like snowflakes, and so on. The dancers were wonderfully dedicated, each playing their part and executing every movement well; there were more details on stage than the eye could take in, and we in the audience felt truly transported to a Christmas party. All in all, this may be an experience I will never forget as long as I live. As far as I’m concerned, this year has already ended to the music of The Nutcracker—tomorrow is next year!