Through the eyes of a child…

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We grow up with The Nutcracker. We change. And it changes before our eyes. While writing my piece about the score for The Guardian, I needed to remind myself that it wasn’t all about death, E minor and eternity. So I took the opportunity to go and see the matinee on Sunday 11th December with my nephew in tow. He will be six in February, so he was probably one of the youngest members of the audience. Despite his age, he was completely gripped.

The magic for him began on entering the auditorium. ‘It’s so beautiful.’ That duck-egg blue ceiling, the descending lighting panels, the elegant sweep of the curtains and the sight of 2256 people all there to see the same thing are hugely impressive for a 5-year-old (and a 30-year-old). It reminded me of the first time I went to Covent Garden on 27 December 1988; I’ve been hooked ever since.

Act 1 of The Nutcracker prompted a series of questions. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘How do they make him fly?’ My stock response of, ‘It’s magic,’ was immediately frowned upon. Boys are pragmatic creatures; they need real answers. So as soon as the query was satisfied, my nephew resumed his concentrated pose. And you could see his eyes widen further when the Christmas tree shot up in size. ‘How do they do it? Is it as tall as my house?’

For a first time ballet goer, he was rather acute. He could spot the ‘mouse’ mime actions, he picked out the snowflake patterns in Ivanov’s choreography and when, in Act 2, Hans-Peter re-enacts the story of how he and Clara came to be in the Kingdom of Sweets, my nephew was the first to hear the recurrent musical motifs. Not bad for a kid who’d never heard the score or seen the ballet.

And it was those musical details that dominated my talk to a Year 12 group at Beaumont School in St Albans last week. It’s a seriously impressive local comprehensive. Admittedly it’s got a good catchment area in a predominantly middle class town, but they were, far and away, the sharpest 6th-form class I’d ever met. They really understood that while you could enjoy the ballet on my nephew’s terms – he later cited the death of the Mouse King as his favourite moment – there was perhaps a bit more going on.

We looked at the whole of the first act in the score, but we spent most of the time on Clara’s glorious pas de deux with Hans-Peter in the forest. That aching C major tune, replete with crunchy subdominant minor chords, invites further investigation. I asked the class for a list of adjectives. ‘Intense… emotional… romantic…’ And then one girl, hesitant at first, suggested it was about sexuality. ‘Is she growing up? Is Clara changing?’ Life reflected art, reflecting life. Perhaps The Nutcracker really is about eternity after all.