Daisy Dunn

The original Nutcracker

The English National Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker was especially enchanting this year, but I left wondering what the story’s original author, E.T.A. Hoffmann would have made of it all.
 
Hoffmann was long dead when his short story, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King) (1816) came to inspire the ballet a generation later. Even if he had lived to see it set to Tchaikovsky’s magical score, he’d have found his own credit severely diminished. For in fact it was the more established and popular author Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale that was, and still is, popularly recognised as the ballet’s main source of inspiration. The puzzling thing is that Dumas’ version, The Tale of the Nutcracker barely differs from Hoffmann’s original, and was penned less than thirty years later, and still about fifty years before Tchaikovsky, Marius Petipa, and Lev Ivanov set about creating their seminal dance.    
 
The problem with Hoffmann is that while he excelled in numerous fields — literary criticism, law, music, art — as a writer he was often misunderstood and viewed unfavourably, especially outside his native Prussia and Germany. His literature, often rich in fantasy, failed to find a popular audience. The following criticism of one of his novels, in this case his Der Doppelgänger, was not unusual in its ferocity: ‘Books of this class do not fall so much within the province of criticism, as of medicine or police; they are preparations to be administered by the physician as emetics, or to be prohibited by the law-giver as occasions of epilepsy or abortion.’
 
It was largely with his Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which he wrote late in his life, that Hoffmann began to find favour as a writer. It was translated into other European languages, and it’s perhaps not without a wry smile that we read its English translator’s subtitle to the work, ‘translated, mutilated, and terminated’. Dumas’ slightly later version altered little, but ‘terminated’ Hoffmann’s story principally through removing the flashback story-within-a-story that described how the prince was turned into the Nutcracker (memorable, perhaps, from the animated version starring Kiefer Sutherland). Yet Dumas would never lack recognition — his Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo would ensure that. How nice it would be to bolster Hoffmann’s posthumous profile and have the prince turn into a Nutcracker on London’s stage next year.

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