TCHAIKOVSKY – Arab Dance (from the Nutcracker Ballet music) – 5 CELLOS

Other Identification:
Tchaikovsky took ballet very seriously, loving the sense of dancing to music. Indeed, it is curious that he was described as writing symphonies that were too ‘balletic’ and ballet music that was too ‘symphonic’. The truth is that they are often merged so as to become a ‘one’.

The Nutcracker Ballet is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 fairy tale ‘Nussknacker und Mausekönig’ (Nutcracker and Mouse King) via a French retelling by Alexandre Dumas. Written in 1892 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the two-act ballet tells the story of waltzing snowflakes, a handsome prince and some warring mice, and a Christmas adventure which transports two young children, Clara and Fritz, into a magical wonderland.

The continuing wonderful popularity of the work is partly because it is a rich and subtly humorous story for children while at the same time offering irony and literary allusions that only adults would understand. In some ways the concept was almost ahead of its time; it has no moral or didactic agenda, and it consciously blurs fantasy and reality as strange nocturnal events take place in the same world that the children inhabit. Just a quick mention that….the first ballet performance ever was on 18th December, 1892, at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia.