The first nutcrackers I ever saw were rounded silver jaws with teeth and handles hinged at the far end. We used them to crack open walnut shells, especially around Christmas. The second one was the soldiers falling at Radio City Music Hall. It was The Nutcracker, a ballet written by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He based it on a short story by a German writer of horror stories. The title was The Nutcracker and The Mouse King.*
In it, a young girl’s favorite toy is a wooden Nutcracker soldier. The handsome young lad comes to life on Christmas Eve and does battle with a seven-headed mouse. The Nutcracker soldier defeats the Evil Mouse King and takes young Clara Marie off to Confectionville, where he just so happens to be a prince with a castle.
A Closer Look at Nutcrackers
The Nutcracker Ballet premiered on December 18, 1892, at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia
It was not well-regarded and remained so until a 1954 performance by the New York City Ballet. The show was the huge hit that began a Christmas tradition performed by ballet companies worldwide.
The novelty in Tchaikovsky’s original score was his use of the celesta
The celesta produced a bell-like sound called soft and adorable when its felt hammers struck its metal plates. It was a percussion instrument that had never been part of an orchestra. Tchaikovsky had a colleague secretly buy a celesta for him in Paris. He told no one else about it, saving it for something special. That turned out to be the character of the Sugar Plum Fairy because of the magical and “heavenly sweet” sound.
Decide for yourself, of course, but when I hear a celesta, it sounds to me like one of those small wooden boxes that plays twinkly music when you open the lid. If this makes me a lowbrow philistine, so be it.
This musical oddity is a percussion instrument with a keyboard
It has a set of graduated metal bars inside that produce sounds when the player strikes the piano-looking black and white keys. The longer bars at one end are pitched lower than the shorter, higher-pitched bars at the other end.
In 1962, American Top 40 record producer Kim Fowley had the idea of updating March of the Wooden Soldiers from The Nutcracker
She got a Los Angeles house band to record it as a boogie piano arrangement. The 45 rpm record label listed Nut Rocker, by B. Bumble & The Stingers. Yes, it’s on Spotify. It went viral in the UK when the BBC considered banning it because it was against the law to parody classical music. Think of this #1 hit single as an instrumental Al Yankovic tune.**
Nut crackers come in three basic types, according to Leavenworth Washington’s Nutcracker Museum
The first tools people used to crack nuts were surely rocks, then hammers, both real teeth savers. Iron lever nutcrackers came next in the evolutionary chain. Then came nutcrackers that squeezed the nuts until they cracked open by turning a screw.
It took a while before anyone hinged together two pieces of wood
The nut goes in the cracker’s open mouth. Press the handle until the shell shatters. Beware those sharp little bits of flying shell fragments.
Craftsmen (and they were men) began to carve stand-up nutcrackers resembling The Nutcracker Ballet’s Wooden Soldiers
Even today, the most popular nut crackers are Nutcracker nutcrackers.
As with so many things, there is so much more to performing the Wooden Soldier Fall than meets the eye
Click here for a very cool look at all 36 Radio City Rockettes rehearsing their famous Wooden Soldier Fall scene from The Nutcracker.
Are there any nutcracker museums near me?
- Atlas Obscura says the Nussknackermuseum in Neuhausen, Germany holds the world’s largest nutcracker collection. Among the more than 6,500 wooden nutcrackers is one that is only two-tenths of an inch long, about 5 mm.
- The Nutcracker Museum in Leavenworth, Oregon displays more than 9,000 nutcrackers from as early as the 12th century.
- The latest reports say a Lithuanian has a private collection of more than 15,000 nutcrackers.
- The Nutty for Nutcrackers Museum in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, says their collection of 3,400 nutcrackers from around the world is the largest collection East of the Mississippi.
Where is the tallest nutcracker?
When I went looking for the world’s largest Nutcracker soldier, I found there’s a 41-foot tall, 16,000-pounder in Roseburg, Oregon. Photos show it’s so massive that it needs guy wires to keep it from keeling over in high winds.
Like an interweb Charles Kuralt, I took some back roads looking for other tall nutcrackers
- In 2013, the Cincinnati Zoo built a 30-footer with a rhinoceros head. This year they did the same thing with a hippopotamus, but it’s only (only!) 22 feet tall.
- A 19-foot-tall fully-functional nussknacker in Neuhausen, Germany cracks coconuts in its huge jaws.
- Next to it is a 33-foot tall decorative nutcracker, listed on the Guinness World Records website as the World’s Tallest, but the sell-by date was 2008.
There were plenty of year-old references to a 65-foot tall nutcracker that was being built in Luverne, Minnesota
But the only pictures I could find showed two huge empty boots standing on an eight-foot-tall base with a giant pole between them. Local editors know a lot about goings on, so I called the editor of the Rock County Star Herald. A very friendly Laurie Sorenson gave me some background information and suggested I call Katy Walgrave.
The Walgrave family business is Those Blasted Things, a shop selling rocks, fossils, and gems
It’s out by the the I-90 / US Highway 75 interchange, where Luverne’s world’s tallest nutcracker is being erected.
Luverne, Minnesota is small town nearer to Iowa and Montana than Minneapolis
In the History Center at the Rock County Historical Society in downtown Luverne, there is a nutcracker museum. Katy told me how years ago Betty Man, a resident historian, had 2,500 nutcrackers at home. Word got around and she let visitors into her home to see them until buses began to unload crowds of the curious at her house. Man donated her nutcracker collection to the History Center and Katy says these days it has more than 7,000 nutcrackers and no two are alike.
When the collection passed 5,000, citizens took to saying that more nutcrackers than people live in Luverne. It was true, but it was also told friendly-style. It’s Minnesota, folks, near Lake Wobegon. Except for three guys in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, snowbounders are friendly folk.
The idea for the statue evolved from a working session with a consultant
Jane Lanphere of the Luverne Area Chamber told Dakota News Now, “So, we wanted to increase tourism and we hired this consultant. He told us that small towns have a marketing budget for only one thing. He said ‘You will turn the town around if you have the biggest of something.’ We asked him, what was our one big thing? He said nutcrackers. So, we’ve been all in trying to work on nutcrackers.”
Katy said delays from the manufacturer put them into winter, where the pieces can only be assembled when it’s not too cold
The middle section was installed last week while the weather was cooperative. Here’s a recent photo Katy sent me:
When the final piece is added to Luverne’s World’s Tallest Nutcracker, the Guinness bunch will come check it out and render their verdict.
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*E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale contains a long flashback story within its main plot titled The Tale of the Hard Nut, which explains how the prince was turned into the Nutcracker when the Evil Mouse Queen put the mojo on him.
**Watch the YouTube video of teenagers dancing to Nut Rocker on Tops Of The Pops, a British music programme (that’s how they spell it) on the Beeb. It’s cool to take The Wayback Machine back and see how kids looked and danced. Hang around for the credits and you’ll see the show was specially prepared for the BBC and Record Mirror in 1972 by the British Market Research Bureau.
Bonus
The Nutcracker Suite is eight orchestral music highlights from the 2-hour long Nutcracker without the dancing. A few know the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (click here for a 2-minute celesta solo video).
Many are likely to recognize The Waltz of the Flowers, even if they, like me, don’t know the name. Click here for a 2-minute video of the New York City Ballet principal ballerina performing the The Waltz of the Flowers surrounded by a dozen children costumed as angels.
Crows are no birdbrains. I watched a short clip that showed how they learned to drop nuts on roadways and wait until cars and trucks cracked the nuts for them. I was fascinated by how they improved their success rate by learning to drop the nuts onto pedestrian crosswalks so they could safely collect them when the light turned red.
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