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Nostradamus wrote:Once upon a time I came across an old cassette labeled something like "Have a groovy funky way-out Disco Christmas". I had to listen to a few seconds out of morbid curiosity, but that was enough.

Crescendo wrote:Ugh. EVERY Christmas tune except for the Nutcracker music. I listen to my Nutcracker tape year round.

When Tschaikovsky was invited in 1890 to compose a ballet based on E. T. A Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, he at first resisted the suggestion. He had read the story with pleasure some eight years earlier, but had thought it unsuitable for ballet. However, the version now offered him was somewhat different from Hoffmann's gothic fairy tale. It was an adaptation (ostensibly by the master choreographer, Marius Petipa, but written largely by his somewhat downtrodden assistant, Lev Ivanov) of Casse-Nioselle, a French rendering of the tale by Alexandre Dumas fils. After reading this version, Tschaikovsky agreed, with some misgivings, to accept the assignment.

Tschaikovsky's periodic depressions about the ballet and the opera seem at first well-grounded. Neither wins better than a polite popular reception and the press is hostile.

The first production of The Nutcracker was a failure: neither critics nor the audience liked it. However, future productions proved more popular. The San Francisco Ballet Company was the first company to perform The Nutcracker in the United States. Their 1944 production was directed by William Christensen. The idea for the San Francisco version came from the memories of a teacher in the ballet company named George Ballenge who remembered a dance he performed in Russia as a child.

In 1944, San Francisco Ballet Director Willam Christensen wrote to the Library of Congress for a copy of the complete Tchaikovsky score. For details of the original Maryinsky Theatre production, Christensen talked to two former members of the Russian Imperial Ballet, Alexandra Danilova and George Balanchine. "Ballet Russe passed through San Francisco and one evening I got Alexandra Danilova and Balanchine, then ballerina of Ballet Russe and ballet master respectively, to come to my apartment," recalls Christensen. "We had something to eat and drink, and then we got down to work with the conductor. Balanchine described the Maryinsky production: how the big doors opened on the tree, the mime of Drosselmeyer, all the details. At one point, Danilova started dancing Clara's variation, in her stocking feet and street dress. Balanchine put an end to that with his admonishment, 'No, no, Alexandra, don't try to show him the actual steps. Let him create his own choreography.' We worked all night, and that is how I got my first Nutcracker...I never intended it to become an annual production, but there you are, it is a tradition now!"