![]() ![]() Marie awakes with her arm mysteriously bandaged (probably by the Nutcracker), must to the concern of her family. Hoffman’s original story 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,' 'The Nutcracker' ballet premiered at Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre on December 6, 1892. ![]() (You won’t find her in Tchaikovsky’s ballet.) She argues with her husband over scraps of food, and the King then asks a human/magician sort of man to fabricate mousetraps to catch and punish his quarrelsome wife. Just to make it all stranger, the Mouse Queen then makes an appearance. She goes to sleep and has a fevered dream as a result of her injury. She then faints and falls into the glass door of the toy cabinet, injuring her arm. When it seems that the mice are winning, Marie throws a shoe at the Mouse King. Mice appear, the Nutcracker and the toys in her toy cabinet come to life and a seven-headed Mouse King appears to lead his troops in battle against the toys. ![]() Her parents agree to let her stay up late and while she lingers near the Christmas tree, a surreal scene unfolds. In it, a young girl named Marie asks her parents if she may stay in the living room and go to bed late so she can spend a little more time to comfort the nutcracker that she received as a Christmas present her brother broke its jaw and it is now bandaged. If you go back to read Hoffmann’s story, I think you will agree that it is raw and troubling. To be correct, Hoffmann’s story did not directly serve as the basis for the ballet, which Tchaikovsky based on a somewhat sentimentalized adaptation of the story (“Histoire d’un casse-noisette”) that Alexandre Dumas published in France in 1844. ![]()
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