Mausekönig hat ja wohl ein feines Ohr

When I was six, my god-aunt took me to New York City to see The Nutcracker at the New York City Ballet. It was my introduction to E.T.A. Hoffmann, although I didn't know that at the time. More importantly, it was my first ballet, at least of the professional kind. I was supposed to have waited until I was seven, but I suppose my natural charm or my god-aunt's impatience prevailed—in any case, it was early enough that the "Nutcracker Suite" has never looked like goldfish or animated mushrooms to me. I remember the Christmas tree rising endlessly out of the floor as Marie reduces to mouse-size, nutcracker-size. I imprinted on Shaun O'Brien's Drosselmeyer.¹ My parents took my brother to the Boston Ballet a few years later, but it did not become a Christmas tradition of ours.

(I still bought the Penguin edition of Hoffmann's original "Nussknacker und Mausekönig" newly translated with Alexandre Dumas' "Histoire d'un casse-noisette" when I ran into it earlier this year in a used book store. I mean, like a shot. I meant to bring it with me today, but it got lost in the sugar cookies and Greek lyric that occupied most of my afternoon.)

Tonight, as a kind of late-birthday, Hanukkah present, fleurdelis28 and Judith took me to The Nutcracker at the Boston Ballet. It was lovely. The choreography was by Mikko Nissinen, the company's artistic director since 2001; I found that there were elements of Balanchine's staging I preferred, like the presence of Drosselmeyer's nephew and the seven heads of the Mouse King (as in the original novella), but I enjoyed seeing the Nutcracker danced by an adult and Sabi Varga, about whom Fleur-de-Lis and I had been very curious,² made a wholly different and excellent Drosselmeyer, graceful and enigmatic in midnight-purple velvet, doing parlor magic for the children—conjuring flowers, making Fritz disappear—before reappearing at midnight, when the magic is real, to guide Clara through the Nutcracker's battle with the mice, into the snow-and-candy fairyland of the second act. (He flies, too, with his cloak in shadowy trails of wings.) The Sugar Plum Fairy and her Nutcracker-Cavalier made me think of figure skaters. The Arabian dancers, sinuous and modern, stopped the show. If I have an ideal version of The Nutcracker, it would reach for more of Hoffmann's uncanny in both acts without falling over into Freud, but I was not disappointed; I can construe the weirder production in my head, even if I'll never be able to transfer it. Two ballets in one year. I should do this more often.

1. My single most vivid memory of the ballet, in fact, is the moment right before the Christmas-tree transformation, when Marie wakes suddenly: the clock is striking midnight, but the carved owl atop it has become her godfather, black-cloaked, crowing, his blind eye glaring and his arms beating like wings. Being six years old, I completely skipped over the idea that this scene was intended to represent the changeover between well-lit middle-class Christmas parties and the fantastical edges of dream and assumed instead that I had no reason, in-ballet or out, to believe that Drosselmeyer is entirely or necessarily human. After all, his nephew was a nutcracker.

2. We did not see him as Coppélius in Coppélia in April—that was Robert Kretz, who tonight did charming, cranky physical comedy as the Grandfather in the first act and snapping work as one of the Chinese dancers in the second—but he discussed the character and the source material in the pre-show talk with such enthusiasm and love, we were sorry to have missed him. For Hoffmann, we figured, he was our man.