BOSTON — Some of the Russians who fled after the 1917 Revolution took little more than the clothes on their back. But a few took treasures to the West that Russia was loath to lose.
Among the most extraordinary was the collection of dance notation of the Imperial Theaters, brought by Nicholas Sergueyev (or Nikolai Sergeev), who had served as the regisseur of the ballet company of the Maryinsky Theater. With these, he mounted ballets like “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Giselle,” Swan Lake” and – yes – “The Nutcracker” in London and Paris. Today his notations are in the Harvard Theater Collection, the basis for several reconstructions and also major research, notably by the American music scholar and dance historian Roland John Wiley.
To understand most aspects of these texts, you need Russian and you need to be able to decipher the now outmoded Stepanov system of dance notation. I have neither. Some of the stage action was translated into English by Mona Inglesby, who owned these manuscripts for many years. So what do they reveal?
At the end of the party Frau Stahlbaum, Clara’s mother, turns to her husband and says, “Oh how tired I am” and he replies, “Me too” — a wonderfully human touch we seldom see onstage today.
Another notation records a 1909 performance led by the ballerina Olga Preobrazhenskaya as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Nicholas Legat as their cavalier — eight years after the death of the Sugar Plum’s choreographer, Lev Ivanov.
At the start of the Sugar Plum Fairy adagio, the script says, “The Fairy speaks.” This is startling by itself, since the Sugar Plum Fairy in most versions “says” nothing here, even in mime terms. But what does she say? We can’t tell. But in Inglesby’s handwriting, at the end of the pas de deux, are the lines: “He spoils me. He spoils me. I am in his good graces.” Are these the Fairy’s words?
Next “They kiss,” followed by “They bow to family.” What family does the Sugar Plum Fairy have? The Nutcracker and Clara, presumably. None of these stage directions has any equivalent in the choreography now shown — by the Royal Ballet among others — as Ivanov’s.
What even the untutored eye can see are the kaleidoscopic patterns of the Act 1 Snowflakes and Act 2 Flowers. Ivanov, who — unlike Balanchine and many others — choreographed most of the scene for the whole corps rather than subgroups, seems to have wanted his Snowflakes to become the crystalline outline of one individual snowflake then another. But there are other moments when five Snowflake rings wheel rapidly while another group runs to form two more circles. Likewise the Flower patterns suggest outer petals and inner stamens of one single flower, then several buds on tall stems.
We’ll never know enough about the 1892 premiere production. There are aspects of it that these notations don’t record (like the the apotheosis in Act 2, that — we know from contemporary accounts — showed bees, danced by girls from the Maryinsky School, before a hive). But these records give us clues to a “Nutcracker” different from any we see onstage today.
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