March (From "The Nutcracker"): A Song History

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote and orchestrated The Nutcracker between February 1891 and April 1892, on a commission from Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Russian Imperial Theatres.[1] The story reached the ballet through Alexandre Dumas's 1845 French retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 tale of the nutcracker and the mouse king, a gentler version than Hoffmann's original.[1][2] Marius Petipa drew up the plan but fell ill, and his assistant Lev Ivanov staged the premiere at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 18 December 1892 (6 December in the Russian calendar of the day), on a double bill with Tchaikovsky's opera Iolanta.[1][2]

Ballet dancers in pale tutus bending to adjust their shoes

Edgar Degas, Frieze of Dancers, oil on fabric, about 1895. Ballet dancers painted in the 1890s, shown for the ballet; it has no connection to The Nutcracker.

The March is the second number of Act 1, an 88-bar movement marked Tempo di Marcia viva.[1] Months before the ballet opened, Tchaikovsky gathered eight numbers into a concert suite and conducted its first performance himself at a Russian Musical Society concert in St Petersburg on 19 March 1892 (7 March Old Style).[2][3] In the suite the March leads off a set of six characteristic dances; the music caught on quickly, and Pyotr Jurgenson published the full score that May.[3]

Americans long knew the music mainly through the suite, including its use in Disney's Fantasia in 1940, until San Francisco Ballet mounted the first full-length professional production in the United States in 1944; George Balanchine's version for New York City Ballet followed on 2 February 1954.[4] Shelley Stevens arranges the March for solo mountain dulcimer in Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel collection of twenty-six intermediate classical pieces in DAD tuning that all call for a 6.5 fret.[5]

Our book that contains the song "March (From "The Nutcracker")"

Sources

  1. Tchaikovsky Research: "The Nutcracker".
  2. Britannica: "The Nutcracker".
  3. Tchaikovsky Research: "The Nutcracker (suite)".
  4. Playbill: "Fifty Years of Pure Magic".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
  6. Image: Edgar Degas, Frieze of Dancers, oil on fabric, about 1895. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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