cents and tell us all about it.
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Nov 17
2009
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Contributed by CW Burke
Holiday-season performances of The Nutcracker are now commonplace, most of you have probably seen The Nutcracker live or on TV or on an old VHS tape or on a newer DVD or at least in some capacity; it is very,very popular. I have personally seen the opera live twice and watched at least two distinctly different PBS specials (one was Russian, I believe). But the ubiquity of The Nutcracker is relatively recent, only since the mid-50s have ballet companies around the world, but mostly in the United States, made the opera a seasonal tradition.
But like all traditions, The Nutcracker began small. The opera was first conceived and composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky between the years 1891 and 1892 to accompany Alexander Dumas's adaptation of the E.T.A. Hoffman story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King." While the opera became enormously popular in Russia, it took until 1934 for it to arrive on American stages, and another 15 years before it gained cultural traction and earned its position in the Holiday canon.
