When Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker debuted on a chilly December evening in 1892 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre of Saint Petersburg, critical and popular reception was, to put it kindly, tepid. The much shorter suite, however, comprising around 20 minutes of the total score, proved more popular and kept The Nutcracker from fading into oblivion in subsequent years. Then, over half a century later, in 1944, something remarkable happened. The San Francisco Ballet staged the full ballet for … Read More