Daniel Kaplan Professor Francisco Javier Jáuregui Approaching the Arts: Music 9 December 2015 Introduction: For my final paper, I have chosen to analyze the piece “The Nutcracker Suite, Op 71a” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and more specifically, the movement titled “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” I picked the Nutcracker specifically because, to be honest, although I am not extremely familiar with a variety of classical songs, when I listened to “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” I began to get nostalgic
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