Woman of the Month: The Sugar Plum Fairy

Woman of the Month: The Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker

I usually try to pick someone particularly iconic for the end of each year, and I’ve also decided to go a little festive this time around. But would you say that the Sugar Plum Fairy is really iconic? I think so.

Most people would be able to pick her out of a line-up, associating her with The Nutcracker (or at least with ballet) and her tinkling music-box melody is surely recognizable to everyone, even if they can’t place the context.

But as a character she’s essentially a non-entity. She’s given no name (only a title made up of a combination of the three most delectable words in the English language) and naturally doesn't speak a word of dialogue. She's not the main character of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, not showing up until the second act, and doesn't even exist in E.T.A. Hoffman's original story. 

Yet to me, it’s what the Sugar Plum Fairy embodies that makes her so memorable. Like Father Christmas or Glinda the Good Witch or Yoda, she’s a character that we intrinsically associate with goodness and benevolence. She's the pinnacle of elegance and beauty and sweetness; she doesn’t have to be anything more than that; her very name conjures up everything we need to know about her.

(That’s why I disliked The Nutcracker and the Four Realms so much, as that movie turns her into one of Disney’s patented Hidden Villains. It was awful).

Antonietta Dell’Era first danced the Sugar Plum Fairy at the Marinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in the December of 1892, with the role having been deliberately created in order to showcase a prima ballerina in the performance (considering the leads Clara and the Nutcracker Prince have always been played by children).

Her performance is also notable due to the use of the celesta (or bell piano) in her solo, an instrument which uses felt hammers to hit its bells (its inventor called it a celesta after its heavenly or “celestial” sound, and the ballet’s original choreographer Marius Petipa wanted the Sugar Plum Fairy’s music to sound like “drops of water shooting from a fountain”).

Tchaikovsky wasn’t the first composer to use the instrument in an orchestral piece, but was the first to give it a prolonged solo – and it’s been a favourite ever since, perhaps most recognizable to modern audiences as the instrument used for Hedwig’s Theme in the Harry Potter films. But everyone knows those delicate first few notes of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

There have been plenty of variations on her character over the years: she was originally the ruler of the Land of Sweets, but some productions have Clara herself transform into the Fairy for the third act, and about ten years ago the New Zealand Royal Ballet reimagined her as the night-nurse of the children’s ward, where Clara was convalescing after an illness.

Since then she’s also become a symbol of Christmas itself – specifically a child’s view of Christmas: think sweets and presents and toyshop windows and trips to the pantomime (there’s a reason Clement Clarke Moore used the phrase: “visions of sugarplums danced in their heads” in The Night Before Christmas).

I was going to make this December a science-fiction month, but now I’m leaning more towards... folksy Christmas fantasy? There’s not really a recognized term for what I’m talking about, only a vibe: think talking dolls, clockwork toys, warm clutter, candlelit Victorian Christmas trees, delicate ornaments, stop-motion animation, I Spy books, Shirley Hughes’s illustrations, paper stars, gingerbread men, television holiday specials from the eighties... the Sugar Plum Fairy fits right into this aesthetic.

She’s not like any female character I’ve showcased on this blog before, simply because she’s not a character but a symbol. For those who celebrate Christmas, she embodies our collective childhood understanding of the holiday – Christmas not as it was, but as it existed in our imaginations. As ephemeral as a snowflake or candy floss, she’s nevertheless still as immortal and eternal as the man in red.

(What IS a sugar plum anyway? A plum infused with sugar? Coated with it? How can I get one? Will it turn out to be a disappointment like Turkish Delight, or is it as incredible as it sounds?)