The Instrument Bought in Secret

Paris, spring 1891. Stopping over on his way to a concert tour of America, Tchaikovsky set eyes on a new instrument. It looked like a small upright piano, but when you pressed a key, little hammers struck metal bars inside and rang out clear as bells. It was the celesta, made a few years earlier by the Paris instrument builder Auguste Mustel.

This is the tenth stop. Tchaikovsky was then writing the ballet The Nutcracker. He wrote to his Moscow publisher Jurgenson asking him to bring the instrument to Russia, and urged him to show it to no one, because other composers, Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov in particular, might hear of it and use it first.

That sound became the voice of the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act II of The Nutcracker. The ballet was first staged in December 1892, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg.

A quick word on the story. On Christmas Eve a girl named Clara receives a nutcracker doll, and in her dream she travels with it to a land of sweets. Its ruler is the Sugar Plum Fairy. Tchaikovsky chose the celesta as the perfect voice for a fairy who glitters like sugar.

The fun part is that beneath the sparkle, something very low sounds too. The bass clarinet now and then slides down into the depths in reply. Bright and dark side by side make the fairy's dance more mysterious.