MOSCOW, December 6, Anastasia Silkina. In 1892, on December 6, according to the old style, the premiere of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet «The Nutcracker» took place. The performance has long become a symbol of the New Year and Christmas. Getting there during the holidays is a great success. Where the legendary ballet is shown and what facts few people know about it — in the material .
Twelve hours in line
The Nutcracker Holiday Series starts on the Historical Stage of the Bolshoi Theater on December 23 and will last until January 7. Although on some days there are two performances, tickets are difficult to buy.
It’s like this every year: gigantic queues, astronomical prices from resellers. The State Bolshoi Theater is suing speculators. They also introduced personalized tickets and a special procedure: you need to sign up in line and receive a bracelet. They sell in waves on certain dates and no more than two per person.
But this doesn’t help either. Sales opened on November 4 — and immediately Avito began offering places in line for 15 thousand rubles. The service began to block ads that sell seat bracelets, as well as accounts that circumvent the rules of the service. And the theater management had to contact the prosecutor's office because of the swindlers who organized illegal pre-recording.
Spectators complained that they stood for 12 hours for bracelets, and when tickets became available for purchase online, the Bolshoi website crashed. type=»photo» data-crop-ratio=»0.702229845626072″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»421″ data-source-sid=»rian_photo» class=»lazyload» width=»1920″ » height=»1348″ decoding=»async» />
The situation was noticed in the State Duma: Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Information Policy Anton Gorelkin compared the excitement with the shortage of the 1990s and suggested that the theater should seriously engage in IT or ask the Ministry of Digital Development to organize trade through “State Services”.
Apparently, all this will become one one of the tasks of the new General Director of the Bolshoi Theater Valery Gergiev.
Alternative “Nutcrackers”
The lucky holders of tickets to the Bolshoi admit: it was their dream. But Tchaikovsky’s ballet will be shown not only at the Bolshoi Theater during the New Year holidays.
In particular, at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Musical Theater . There are no kilometer-long queues there.
At the St. Petersburg Mariinsky, where, by the way, the world premiere of this performance took place, there are tickets for December 31st. True, even a place with limited visibility, as indicated on the website, costs 15,600 rubles.
The New Year's ballet is in the repertoire of the Mikhailovsky Musical Theater in St. Petersburg, the Perm Opera and Ballet Theater, the Ural Opera Ballet Theater in Yekaterinburg, and NOVAT in Novosibirsk. In the Urals, according to the online poster, there are no tickets left. In Siberia they complained that the first rows were bought up by Muscovites; there, as at the Bolshoi, the play is shown in the version of the legendary Yuri Grigorovich.
The French Revolution and Prince Macaulay Culkin
Nowadays, few people remember that “The Nutcracker” is associated with the Great French Revolution, the centenary of which was celebrated in 1889. Choreographer Marius Petipa suggested that Tchaikovsky use songs from that time. Of course, it was impossible to stage such a performance in Tsarist Russia, but the composer still left one of the revolutionary motifs in the score.
There are other musical quotes in “The Nutcracker”: a Georgian lullaby turned into an Arabic dance, and in the parents’ dance sounds the German Grossvater Tanz («Grandfather's Dance»).
For the premiere, Tchaikovsky secretly brought from Paris a new instrument for Russia — the celesta, in his words, “something between a small piano and a glockenspiel, with a divinely wonderful sound.”
Celesta in the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy made a great impression on the audience. However, overall the performance received devastating reviews: it was called boring and tasteless. And not everyone even liked the music.
Nevertheless, Tchaikovsky’s ballet conquered the whole world.
By the way, one of the most popular versions of “The Nutcracker” in the West was staged by a native of the Soviet Union, George Balanchine. In 1993, it was turned into a movie, the Prince was played by Macaulay Culkin, a student of the Balanchine ballet school, star of the film “Home Alone”.