… THE GREAT GOLD HALL ablaze with lights, the red velvet seats alive with children … rows and rows of children’s faces, all upturned, a Christmas candy box of nougats, cherries, caramels, peppermint creams, and almost all of them the shining, scrubbed faces of little girls … delectable would-be ballerinas, brushed and shining and trembling. For one month every year during the holiday season, such is the impression looking down from the balcony into the orchestra section of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center when, night after night and every matinee, the New York City Ballet puts on its Christmas classic, The Nutcracker.
Lights darken, noises dim, Tschaikovsky’s overture pours fourth in creamy swirls of sound, audible Nesselrode. The gold curtain pleats upward in damask swags to reveal a gay party in nineteenth-century Germany—mothers in hoopskirts, dashing, mustached papas, daughters in ball dresses, little boys in velvet suits—all rushing happily about the stage, bowing, curtsying, whirling with glee.
A crooked old man enters, leaning on a stick. The children flock around him. He is Herr Drosselmeier, and he has brought to the party with him a very special Christmas gift, a magic nutcracker. Soon he will tell them a story about it, an elaborate and cracked tale first penned by E. T. A. Hoffman: that is his nutcracker suite. But first he distributes nuts, real nuts, to the eager children. In the Balanchine staging, a restaging of the master’s own dream of magical childhood, seven tiny girls in mauve pantaloons cluster around the old man’s knees. In fact they are seven infant ballerinas, rigorously chosen, the crème de la crème of very young students at the ballet school which trains many of the dancers who will one day join the Company’s corps de ballet, one of the best the world has known.
The seven child ballerinas tease, plead, twirl, cajole. The candy box of audience children holds its sweet breath. To which one of the seven will Herr Drosselmeier present his very first nut? The child ballerinas themselves do not know. Indeed, they have made it a game, a very secret game, just between themselves and the gnarled old man. Which one will he choose tonight? they wonder as they dart enchantingly about. Lately, though, the game has gone flat. Lately he always chooses the same dancer. He always gives the first nut to the tiniest one of them all. She is a grave child who never smiles. She is eight years old. Her name is Ariadne.