The original Nutcracker

The English National Ballet’s performance of the Nutcracker was especially enchanting this year, but I left wondering what the story’s original author, E.T.A. Hoffmann would have made of it all.
 
Hoffmann was long dead when his short story, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King) (1816) came to inspire the ballet a generation later. Even if he had lived to see it set to Tchaikovsky’s magical score, he’d have found his own credit severely diminished. For in fact it was the more established and popular author Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale that was, and still is, popularly recognised as the ballet’s main source of inspiration. The puzzling thing is that Dumas’ version, The Tale of the Nutcracker barely differs from Hoffmann’s original, and was penned less than thirty years later, and still about fifty years before Tchaikovsky, Marius Petipa, and Lev Ivanov set about creating their seminal dance.