This dance is one of the most famous musical moments in all ballet. Tchaikovsky choice of the celesta (heard first as Clara and Hans-Peter's arrive in the Kingdom of Sweets) proved an ingenious one. Sugary but tart, its prissy bell-like notes later came to dominate the highly sexualised world of post-Wagnerian opera. Strauss, Schreker and Korngold used the instrument to excess. It speaks of an 'other', something artificial perhaps, or here, framed in that earlier 'jeopardy' key of E minor, something more deathly. This is the quintessence of ballerina delicacy. The Sugar Plum Fairy represents untouchable femininity or, for Petipa the music should sound akin to 'drops of water shooting out of fountains'. Tchaikovsky favours unresolved streams of dissonance. Flattened subdominant and dominant notes act as precarious lynchpins within the context. The Fairy and Prince's descending scale becomes a rather forlorn bass clarinet solo (then passed elsewhere in the woodwind) and the response to the dominant (itself rather short and sharp in appearance) is a stream of diminished chords in first and second position. Everything seems to hover around the tonic rather than endorsing it. After a stream of diminished and minor seventh arpeggios, the tune returns one octave higher and the dance ends with a rapid coda, highly reminiscent of the snowflake music.Today's Track on Spotify.
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Sarah Lamb as the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Royal Ballet's production of The Nutcracker
Photograph © ROH/Johan Persson
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