The genius of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score

By all accounts, Tchaikovsky struggled to compose The Nutcracker. It wasn’t his idea of an effective ballet scenario, and he was unimpressed with the choreographer Marius Petipa’s prettified storyline. Mid-composition, he learned of the death of his younger sister Alexandra. ‘Even more than yesterday, I feel absolutely incapable of depicting the Kingdom of Sweets in music,’ he wrote. But inspiration can be counterintuitive. On a good day, Tchaikovsky could write as fluently as any Victorian serial novelist, churning out forgettable piano pieces (as he put it) ‘like batches of pancakes’. Projects like The Nutcracker put him through purgatory but the result, with hindsight, was nothing less than the sound of Christmas.

Or one particular sound of Christmas, anyway. Others are available, not least Britain’s own choirboy-heavy choral tradition, with its faintly eerie atmosphere of damp mornings and cold churches. The Russian version — the Nutcracker version — is different. It’s a banquet on an imperial scale, served in a candlelit ballroom while stars sparkle like Fabergé diamonds against a velvet sky. Well, that’s how it always feels to me, and if that sounds decadent, it’s offset a thousandfold by the craftsmanship and compassion with which Tchaikovsky attends to every single bar.

So the curtains are drawn, the log-burner is doing its bit for global warming, and you’ve got a bottle of Stoli in the freezer that isn’t going to drink itself. How to sustain that Winter Palace vibe into the early hours? Step one is to revisit The Nutcracker itself. Over-familiarity breeds contempt, particularly if you know Tchaikovsky’s score only through the The Nutcracker Suite — essentially a short highlights package that Tchaikovsky assembled as a sort of promotional demo. Begin with those lollipop numbers, and this time savour every marvellous detail.