Waltz Of The Flowers: A Song History

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The Waltz of the Flowers belongs to Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker, which Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Russian Imperial Theatres, commissioned after talks with the composer in late 1890; the scenario he and Marius Petipa assembled follows Alexandre Dumas's 1845 retelling of E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 tale.[1] In the score the waltz is No. 13 of Act II, marked Tempo di Valse and running to 353 bars, and it falls between the divertissement (No. 12) and the Pas de deux (No. 14).[1] Tchaikovsky completed his sketches for the second act in the summer of 1891, after returning from America, and Jurgenson brought out the full score in 1892.[1] The ballet opened at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 6/18 December 1892, on a double bill with the opera Iolanta, in a production by Lev Ivanov conducted by Riccardo Drigo.[1][2]

Painting of a large bouquet of roses, peonies and white flowers in a bowl on a table

Henri Fantin-Latour, Summer Flowers, oil on canvas, 1880. A bouquet of summer flowers painted by Henri Fantin-Latour in 1880, shown for the waltz's title; the painting has no connection to the music.

Concert audiences met the waltz first, since it closes the orchestral suite Tchaikovsky drew from the ballet and conducted at a Russian Musical Society concert in St Petersburg on 7/19 March 1892; there it stands in D major and is the longest of the suite's movements.[3] The suite caught on quickly, and although the ballet itself was poorly received at first and its composer thought less of it than of The Sleeping Beauty, it is now staged more often than any other ballet, a Christmas-season fixture because its first act is set at a holiday party.[3][2] Butch Ross gives the waltz a place in The Crash Bang Dulcimer Christmas Book, his collection of offbeat dulcimer tab for Christmas classics, which also takes in the Trepak and the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies and comes with MP3 recordings of the arrangements.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Waltz Of The Flowers"

Sources

  1. Tchaikovsky Research: "The Nutcracker".
  2. Britannica: "The Nutcracker".
  3. Tchaikovsky Research: "The Nutcracker (suite)".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Butch Ross, The Crash Bang Dulcimer Christmas Book".
  5. Image: Henri Fantin-Latour, Summer Flowers, oil on canvas, 1880. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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