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  3. The first performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, in St. Petersburg in 18

The first performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, in St. Petersburg in 18

游客2023-12-16  28
问题   The first performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, in St. Petersburg in 1892, was a flop. Wrote one critic the next day: "For dancers there is rather little in it; for art absolutely nothing, and for the artistic fate of our ballet, one more step downward." Two decades passed before another production was attempted.
  A century later, the ballet constitutes the single biggest fine-arts moneymaker in the United States, which has claimed the ballet as its own. In 1996, box-office receipts for some 2,400 American performances of the work by more than 20,000 dancers totaled nearly U.S. $50 million. Despite the ballet’s popularity, however, few Americans are aware of its history -- or of some of the twists and turns of fete that have changed it from its original form.
  Choreographer Maurice Petipa (known as the "father of classical ballet") prepared the first production for Tchaikovsky in 1892. He based his scenario not on the macabre 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Fang of the Mice by E. T. A. Hoffmann, which the composer had thought to use for his inspiration, but on Alexander Dumas’s more benign 1845 French adaptation. Petipa did use the Hoffmann version to name his characters, but mixed up some names because he could not read German. (The heroine of the piece, Clara, should be named Marie according to the story. Clara is in fact the name of one of her dolls.)
  In the original story the Mouse King had seven heads and terrified the seven-year-old Marie by foaming blood from all seven mouths and grinding and chattering all seven sets of teeth. These memorable characteristics, along with other sinister qualities in Hoffmann’s story, are among those aspects of the original that have been removed in most modem adaptations.
  Removed from the ballet altogether by Petipa is a vital plot-within-a-plot in the Hoffmann story. This is the fairytale related to Marie while she recovers from injuries sustained in the battle between the forces of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King. As a result, the storyline in the ballet does not really make sense.
  In the fairytale, we learn that the Mouse King’s desire for vengeance has its origins in his evil mother, the wily Madam Mouserinks, whose first seven sons have been executed by the royal court for eating all the fat from the royal family’s sausages. In retribution, Madam Mouserinks has attacked the little Princess Pirlipat in her cradle, turning her into a misshapen creature whose beauty can be restored only if she eats a certain rare, difficult-to-crack nut called Krakatuk.
  After many years the nut is finally located in Asia by the court clockmaker and wizard, Drosselmeyer, whose young nephew is identified as a prime candidate to crack it. The young man is already known as "the Nutcracker" for the gallantry he shows in cracking nuts for young ladies in his father’s shop. As predicted, he alone is able to crack the hard nut. He offers it to the princess to eat, and her beauty is restored. At that moment, however, the Nutcracker chances to step backwards, trampling on none other than Madam Mouserinks. She is fatally injured, but manages to place a curse on the young man before she dies. He is transformed into a grotesque parody of his former self, with a monstrous head, a yawning mouth and a lever in the back by which his jaw may be moved up and down. Madam Mouserinks sentences him to battle her son, the Mouse King, whom she bore after the death of her seven previous sons, and who has their seven heads. The curse may be removed only when the Nutcracker is able to win the love of a young lady in spite of his ugliness....
  Hoffmann, the author of the original Nutcracker story, was as peculiar as many of his characters. Small and wiry, with sunken eyes and dark bushy hair, he had nervous tics that caused his hands, feet and face to twitch constantly. He adored the music of Mozart (and changed one of his middle names from Wilhelm to Amadeus, to honor the great composer), was subject to bouts of deep melancholy and was an alcoholic who sold the rights to his first book for a cellar of wine. He eventually died of a combination of liver disease and a neural illness that gradually paralyzed his body, starting with his feet.
  Several of Hoffmann’s stories provided the basis for operas and ballets. The French composer Jacques Offenbach, for example, used three of his short stories as the basis for The Tales of Hoffmann -- a quite serious piece, breaking with Offenbach’s earlier light-hearted style.
  Tchaikovsky, composer of The Nutcracker, was invited to conduct his work but refused. He was terrified that if he were to mount the podium and try to conduct an orchestra his head might fall off. He died shortly after the first performance of The Nutcracker, during a cholera epidemic -- it was supposed he had been drinking impure water, but a more recent theory suggests that he killed himself out of fear of exposure for a sexual scandal involving the Russian royal family.
  The author and the composer may have had unusual characteristics, and the story of the Nutcracker itself may be bizarre, but its popularity endures. In recent years American choreographers have played with the formula to bring it up to date. Kirk Peterson’s The American Nutcracker is set in the redwood forests of Northern California and replaces some of the characters with legendary or famous American names -- notably 19th-century writer Mark Twain as a party guest.
  The Pacific Northwest Ballet’s popular Nutcracker production uses sets by avant-garde designer Maurice Sendak and plumbs the tale’s dark psychological aspects far deeper than most. Production company Ballethnic in Atlanta, Georgia, has an Urban Nutcracker set in Atlanta in the 1940s; costumes in earth, amber and chocolate tones represent the different skin colors of the ethnic mix.
  In Baton Rouge, Louisianna, the Regional Ballet has in its repertory a Bayou Nutcracker in which Clara falls asleep in a bayou, dreams of a lavish plantation party and travels to the land of sweets in a hot-air balloon.
  Americans wanting to reclaim some of the psychology of the Hoffmann short story have been investigating choreographer Mark Morris’s dark 1991 update since it became available on video. Set in the 1960s, Morris’s visionary The Hard Nut probes many of the same moral issues as the Hoffmann original, most of which are lost in today’s conventional versions.  [br] Which of the following statements about Hoffmann’s short stories was NOT true?
选项 A、Many of the characters in these stories were peculiar.
B、Several ballets were based on his stories.
C、There were operas adapted according to his stories.
D、Most of the stories were sinister in nature.
答案 D
解析 细节题。本题可采用排除法。第八段第一句提到，霍夫曼和他塑造的很多角色一样奇特，故排除A；第九段第一句提到，霍夫曼的几部短篇小说给歌剧和芭蕾舞剧提供了素材，故排除B、C；第四段提到，鼠王让人难忘的特征以及霍夫曼小说中其他险恶的因素在大多数现代改编版本中被删除了，但原文并未提到霍夫曼的大部分短篇小说实际上都很险恶，故选D。
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