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CELEBRATION!
Sir Winston Churchill once sat fretting over dinner. "This pudding," he announced, "will never do. It lacks theme!"
If there is one thing The Nutcracker does not lack, it is theme. Productions which lay aside the original theme, allowing that the ballet is merely a paean to childhood, or a Christmas pageant, or a Freudian exploration of emergent sexuality, already cross over into the region of the bland, or worse, sour Nutcracker.
This ballet is a celebration of prosperity and good times. Act I, taking place in a happy home, obviously filled with love of parents for children, children for parents, and friends for friends of all ages, begins by celebrating generosity and kindness at a Christmas party. When Clara falls asleep, she falls into a "night terror" which is conquered by friendly images from her party.
The central icon of Act I, the Christmas tree, is a true symbol of domestic happiness, it having migrated from Germany through Victorian England, where the Royal Family there, following Prince Albert's Christmas traditions brought from Germany, put up their Christmas tree, and sent the practice into widespread western usage. Russia, so long isolated from the rest of the world by internal struggles and a lingering suspicion of outsiders, was just beginning to emerge from an isolationist period, and was partaking of the benefits of commerce and communication with Europe and Asia. They had bought into the idea of the Christmas tree; in fact Dostoevsky wrote a sentimental and warm (for him) short story entitled "Christ's Christmas Tree". Further, in the original libretto, the tree is the unifier of the whole first Act. It is the only item which remains onstage throughout; it is discovered on at curtain rise, changes for the dream sequence, and when the transformation to the snow scene happens, it becomes the whole forest.
Act I is so terribly busy with narrative, that when Act II comes along, some people are rather puzzled by the dead stop to the story and the long divertissement which takes up most of the act. Apart from the convention involved in 19th-century ballets, this divertissement is more than just a parade of goodies from the party, the goodies represent Russia's successful entry into the world market. It mystifies some viewers that Hot Chocolate should be Spanish and not Dutch; in the 1890s, Spain was the IBM of the chocolate business, it having ruled that market since the sixteenth century with its American colonies producing the raw cacao. Holland was only coming onto the scene with a new process for refining chocolate and had not yet made its influence dominant in that product. Tea, was, of course, a Russian favorite, and the tea markets of the Orient were growing enticingly closer with the beginning of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in 1891. The brand is even recognizable; in some early productions purporting to be Ivanov's choreography, the big phoo dog used in it say "Ty-Phoo". (The Balanchine production makes it Swee-Touch-Nee, an American brand, with its red lacquer teachest.) Coffee from Arabia, specifically Yemen, was available from the Black Sea ports at much reduced prices than previously because of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. By the 1890s, Russian households were able to enjoy the beverage which had formerly been available only to the wealthiest. Hard candy in rod form, like candy canes, must be consumed where they are made, transportation would break them - of course, candy canes are Russian! Marzipan is the sweet of Denmark, and the figurine-like Marzipan Shepherdesses reinforce the image with choreography fillied with taqueterie, and also pirouettes done on demi-pointe, perhaps a Petipa/Ivanov nod in the direction of Bournonville. And of course, there must be Mother Ginger and the Polichinelles! According to Balanchine, the French equivalent of The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe was a very recognizable brand of bonbon in St. Petersburg - she was also recycled for her second hit appearance after a similar entree in Petipa's earlier ballet The Wilful Wife.
All of these international favorites are not just for fun, this is Vsevolozhsky, Petipa and Ivanov celebrating the plenty of the new Russian
economy in 1892.Another thing to realize about The Nutcracker is that it was not intended to stand on its own; it was the "B feature" on a double-bill that had as its primary attraction Tchaikovsky's dark and foreboding opera about a young woman blind from birth, Iolanthe (not to be confused with the Gilbert and Sullivan opera-comique of the same name). Nutcracker is a "ballet feerie" sometimes translated "fairy ballet". It would be better to translate this term "enchantment ballet" and recognize that it was the light finish to an evening which began somber.
The final tableau sets the whole theme together, if we take the big beehive that appears (with guardian bees) and realize that bees are a classic metaphor for industry, and they produce honey! Of course they also sting, which would sit just fine with the xenophobic Russians. (It also should be noted that a bee-skep looks very much like the Imperial crown of Russia.) This whole show is the Maryinsky saying, Calvin Coolidge-like, "The business of Russia is business!"