An Essay on the context of The Nutcracker
The Nutcracker is a ballet which was first performed in Russia on the 18th of December 1892. It is based off the story of the story ‘The Nutcracker and The Mouse King’ by German author E.T.A. Hoffman. The Ballet’s music is among the most well known in the world with the whole score being written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with it being the third of his most successful pieces today. The ballet itself is about a girl named Clara (Or Masha in The Great Russian Nutcracker) who gets a nutcracker doll on Christmas eve from the town toymaker Herr Drosselmeyer.. That night she sneaks downstairs to find her nutcracker doll only to find a battle going on between the toys and the Mouse king and his men. At the…show more content… Tchaikovsky is said to have been a homosexual himself although it has been debated whether he was or not by various people. Though through reading his letters to his nephew it has been determined that he was gay. Though for the time if this was found out there would have been a huge scandal. Despite being gay he was married once to Antonina Milyukova in 1877. Though he told her he did not love her he said he would be her devoted friend. Unsurprisingly the marriage was a disaster. As he tried to drown himself two weeks into the marriage and then fled to Moscow where he was separated form his wife. Though Tchaikovsky tried he was never successful in divorcing his wife and he gave up on the idea in 1881. He was married to her the rest of his life through the time he wrote Nutcracker Throughout his life he was uncomfortable with the idea of being Gay and towards the end of his life it was his marriage that did help him come to terms with it. He took many lovers throughout his life and the most notable may be his Nephew Vladimir Lvovich Davïdov nicknamed “Bob” whom he was in relations with late 1880 presumably until his death in 1893. This was also during the time he was writing the Nutcracker. He would write to Vladimir when he was away on musical tours abroad. A quote from one letter shows just how close they