25 Days of Nutcracker-A Countdown to Christmas Day 1

Intro/History of the Nutcracker

**This post is short, but the rest are going to be much longer**

The Nutcracker is a fairy-tale ballet in two acts, three scenes, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composed in 1891–92. Alexandre Dumas Pere's adaptation of the story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" by E. T. A. Hoffmann was set to music by Tchaikovsky (staged by Marius Petipa and commissioned by the director of the Imperial Theatres Ivan Vsevolozhsky in 1891). The plot of Hoffmann's story is much more elaborate than that of the ballet; in the tale, the heroine Marie's adventures with the toys and with the Nutcracker are not a dream, and at the end she marries the Nutcracker/Prince.
St. Petersburg Premiere
The first performance of the ballet was held as a double premiere together with Tchaikovsky's last opera "Iolata" on 18 December 1892, at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. Who exactly choreographed the first production has been debated. Although Lev Ivanov is often credited, contemporary accounts credit Marius Petipa. The ballet was conducted by Riccardo Dirigo, with Antoinetta Dell-Era as the Sugar Plum Fairy, Pavel Gerdt as Prince Coqueluche, Stanislava Belinskaya as Clara, Sergei Legat as the Nutcracker-Prince, and Timofei Stukolkin as Drosselmeyer