'Messiah' and 'Nutcracker' -- unlikely holiday staples

‘Tis the season of Tchaikovsky and Handel, the two classical composers America can’t live without – at least in the month of December. The holidays without "Nutcracker" and "Messiah" would be unthinkable. And yet, the former was a flop initially, and the latter was written for Easter, not Christmas.

Tchaikovsky was a self-tortured homosexual Russian who grew prematurely old with doubts about his own abilities. After he composed “Nutcracker,” he pronounced to a friend his severe disappointment with the score, saying “it contains no melody.” Today, that’s like saying Arizona sunsets have no color. But when something is new, the ears that receive it aren’t always ready to hear what’s truly there – even when the ears belong to the composer.

Tchaikovsky might have been aided in his negativity by what show people call “bad b.o.” – poor box office, that is. The initial “Nutcracker” wasn’t a much of a success. Compared to his earlier ballet hits, “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” it flopped miserably. Critics ravaged it. One sniffed, “For dancers there is rather little in it, for art absolutely nothing, and for the artistic fate of our ballet, one more step downward.” It was more than 20 years after the composer’s death that Russia took fondly to the final ballet score of its most famous composer.

It took even longer for America to catch on. The music was played by American orchestras in the excerpts known as the “Nutcracker” Suite, but it wasn’t until 1940 that Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo brought the actual ballet to American scores. It didn’t really catch on. But then, in 1954, George Balanchine decided the make “Nutcracker” a holiday feature of his New York City Ballet, the company he had founded after emigrating to the United States from Russia in the 1930s. New York City Ballet had become the epicenter of the first wave of ballet mania to hit the U.S. Dancers who graduated from Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, often moved to Oklahoma or Oregon or Arizona to start their own companies. They took “Nutcracker” with them, and by the 1970s, it was firmly established as the cash cow for most regional American dance companies.

If Tchaikovsky was the essence of dour, the composer of “Messiah” was of a different order entirely. If ever a classical composer was a savvy businessman, Georg Frederic Handel was it. Born in Germany, Handel picked up the Italian opera style in Italy and took it to London, where he made a name for himself in a foreign country as the master of a form borrowed from yet another foreign country. When, at length, the Italian style ran its course, Handel found himself without commissions and on the brink of poverty. He switched genres with the alacrity of a salesman dumping an antiquated line for the latest fad. The English loved oratorios – large-scale choral works that relate stories purely through music, without the benefit of staging. He wrote a couple as warm-up, and then launched into an oratorio that summarized the Christian religion in the King’s English: “Messiah,”

Premiered in Dublin at Easter, 1742, Handel’s “Messiah” was an instant success. The King of England was in attendance, and even stood up during the stirring “Hallelujah” Chorus, starting a centuries-long tradition. Over the centuries, “Messiah” became associated with Christmas, at least in America, even though “Hallelujah” is supposed to "happen" at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion.

Handel didn’t stop there. Looking around at London, he noticed a large Jewish population and immediately produced a Hanukkah oratorio called “Jeptha.” It sold huge.

I’ve often wondered how much Tchaikovsky and Handel would be raking in from royalties, were they alive today and their works still in copyright. A modest guess would be several million dollars annually.

Somewhere, the ghost of Tchaikovsky is shaking his head in disbelief at his own music's enormous popularity, while Handel’s ghost is figuring how to increase the cash flow from his stunning global fame.

- Kenneth LaFave