There comes a moment in 'The Nutcracker' when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances to a tune you’ve probably heard before. Over plucked string instruments, a glassy bell-like melody emerges from a celesta, evoking water drops and then more as those drops give way to flowing runs. Photo: ©2024 The New York Times Company
There comes a moment in The Nutcracker, a ballet full of fantasy of fantastical music, when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances to a tune you’ve probably heard before.
Over plucked string instruments, a glassy, bell-like melody emerges from a celesta, evoking water drops and then more as those drops give way to flowing runs. It’s a transporting sound: mysterious and otherworldly, delicate and playful.
This is the famous Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy, a highlight of The Nutcracker and a holiday staple, born on the stage and heard today in commercials and on movie soundtracks around this time every year.
The Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy is so familiar that it’s difficult to imagine that when this music was new, in 1892, it was really new. And that’s because of the celesta.
Only recently invented, the celesta was in its infancy when Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky began to imagine how he might write for it. Since then, its sound has spread throughout classical music and into pop, often with the same magical effect you hear in The Nutcracker.
At first glance, the celesta would have looked to Tchaikovsky and his contemporaries, like a piano with fewer keys. Under the surface, though, keyboard instruments vary widely.
Take the harpsichord, a reigning keyboard instrument of the baroque. To play it, you press a key, which triggers an action to pluck a string inside the wooden, boxlike frame. The resulting sound is bright and short-lived. With the modern piano, a key is pressed to hammer a string inside; more sensitive and sophisticated than a harpsichord, the piano allows for different colours and degrees of strength, as well as the ability to sustain a note.
Hanna Kim playing the celesta at the David H. Koch Theatre, home of the New York City Ballet, New York. Photo: ©2024 The New York Times Company
The celesta came much later, invented by Parisian organ-maker Auguste Mustel in 1886. It is smaller than the piano, almost a toy by comparison, and with a less expansive keyboard. Mustel’s innovation was to have the keys set off an action that, rather than plucking or hammering strings, hammered a small metal bar over wooden resonators. Picture a glockenspiel, a mainstay of orchestral percussion sections, hidden inside a piano.
Celestas and glockenspiels have quite different sounds, though. The celesta is softer and is a transposing instrument, meaning that its pitch is always an octave higher than the notes on the page. Early listeners, hearing its fanciful tone and silvery timbre, found it more astral than other keyboard instruments, which led to its name: celesta, or heavenly.
Tchaikovsky heard the celesta in Paris while on his way to the United States, historian Simon Morrison writes in his recent biography Tchaikovsky’s Empire. The composer described the experience in an 1891 letter to his publisher:
“I discovered a new orchestral instrument in Paris, something between a miniature piano and a Glockenspiel, with a divinely wondrous sound. The instrument is called the ‘Celesta Mustel’ and costs 1,200 francs. It can be obtained only from its Paris inventor, M. Mustel. I’m hoping you’ll order this instrument for me.”
The instrument, Tchaikovsky predicted, would “have a colossal effect.” And he already knew how he would use it. He alluded to The Nutcracker, planned for fall 1892, but expressed a more immediate need “next season” for his symphonic ballad The Voyevoda. He asked that his publisher not show the celesta to anyone else.
“I fear,” he wrote, “that Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov will hear about it and deploy its extraordinary effects before I get to do so.”
'The Nutcracker' is a beloved Christmas ballet, first performed in 1892, with music by Tchaikovsky. Known for its enchanting score and festive themes, it has become a holiday tradition worldwide. Photo: AFP
Little did Tchaikovsky know, another composer had incorporated the celesta into an orchestra: Ernest Chausson. In 1888, Chausson wrote a small part for the instrument in his incidental music for a production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Paris.
Chausson’s Tempest music has never been widely performed, however, and the celesta didn’t enter a full-scale symphony orchestra until Tchaikovsky premiered his Voyevoda, in 1891. Like Chausson, he seems to have been most attracted to its sound in arpeggios, or chords broken up into runs of individual notes.
The Voyevoda is scarcely heard today. And it isn’t the best showcase for the celesta; it wasn’t until The Nutcracker that Tchaikovsky unleashed the instrument’s full potential. In the Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy, he at first treats it almost as a piano, with phrases as quick and light-footed as a ballerina on pointe.
No longer background colour, the celesta becomes, for the first time, the centre of attention. When Tchaikovsky has the celesta begin a string of arpeggios, it’s not as a texture to support other instruments, but as a solo passage similar to a cadenza in a concerto.
The effect is of a dreamy whirlwind that leads to the initial melody, but twinkling an octave higher than before. Then, in the coda, the celesta dashes to the finish line, with both of the sounds it has used throughout the dance: fast runs of notes over light pricks of harmony.
It wasn’t long before other composers fell for the celesta. (Gustav Mahler requested that there be not one, but three if possible in performances of his Sixth Symphony.) And they often followed Tchaikovsky’s example of using the instrument to fantastical effect.
Richard Strauss deployed the celesta’s sound in the lustrous, dreamy Presentation of the Rose scene of his opera Der Rosenkavalier. Similarly heady is a passage from George Gershwin’s An American in Paris that incorporates the instrument. Bela Bartok included it in his idiosyncratically orchestrated Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta, harking back to the era of celesta arpeggios as a source of soft colour.
Tchaikovsky heard the celesta in Paris while on his way to the United States, historian Simon Morrison writes in his recent biography 'Tchaikovsky’s Empire'. Photo: ©2024 The New York Times Company
And in the 20th century, the celesta began to appear on Top 40 charts. It has been woven into songs by Kate Bush and Bjork, Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd. Perhaps most famously, it quaintly opens Buddy Holly’s Everyday and joyously bobs, not unlike the Sugar Plum Fairy’s dance, at the start of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.
Truest to Tchaikovsky’s treatment of the celesta in The Nutcracker, as a vehicle for fantasy, has been the instrument’s appearance in film soundtracks. In the 1971 musical Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, a celesta hypnotically sparkles as Wonka sings Pure Imagination, introducing visitors to the chocolate river and candy-coated landscape of his factory.
In the 21st century, the celesta may be most closely associated with a work of fantasy that rivals The Nutcracker in popularity: the Harry Potter films. The first three were scored by John Williams, the reigning composer of symphonic movie soundtracks, with an encyclopaedic and reverential sense of how classical music can shape franchises like Jaws, Star Wars and Home Alone.
The film adaptation of Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone opens with the defining musical motif of the series, a celesta melody called Hedwig’s Theme. You could describe this tune with the same language you would use for the Dance Of The Sugar Plum Fairy, toy-like in its fun and transporting in its allure. Above all, it is magical.
Instruments have a way of quickly conjuring moods and images, and that’s largely because of how they’ve been used in the past.
The English horn is nostalgic; the French horn, noble. And if Hedwig’s Theme immediately brings the world of magic to mind, that association was planted by Tchaikovsky well over a century ago in The Nutcracker. – ©2024 The New York Times Company
