Tchaikovsky at Christmas

Ritual, memory, and the strange persistence of the nineteenth century

By Conrad Phillip Kottak

Yesterday, May 7, was Tchaikovsky’s birthday. I know this because I occasionally peruse “On This Day” (On This Day), a website that lists historical events along with the birthdays and death dates of prominent people.

Seated statue of Tchaikovsky on the grounds of his summer home at Klin, which is preserved as a museum.

When I was somewhere between eight and ten years old, I received for Christmas a vinyl recording of The Nutcracker Suite with lyrics added to Tchaikovsky’s music by Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians.

Oddly enough, I still recall the opening lines:

“Come ring the curtain up, the drama is beginning!
Watch as the spotlight shows a merry bit of make believe.”

That record has mostly faded into obscurity except among a scattering of former children whose Christmases once included it. But in thinking about my own exposure to classical music, I realized that Tchaikovsky at Christmas was where it began.

I never played an instrument. Our family did not have the means for a piano, something I’ve always regretted. But I did take singing and dancing lessons, which were more common for boys back then than they are now. I sang publicly, including once on the radio, and while I cannot honestly claim that I tap-danced my way toward stardom, I did tap dance for a while. That training has shaped every dance step I’ve taken since then.

From Christmas Records to Columbia

My next memorable exposure to classical music came years later in Music Humanities at Columbia University. There we moved from madrigals to modern music: Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Stravinsky, electronic music. We studied Don Giovanni, the 1812 Overture, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, The Rite of Spring, Symphonie fantastique, and much else. I had a record player and listened carefully, but my lack of practical musical training hurt me in that course.

But what stayed with me longest was still Tchaikovsky at Christmas.

Coincidentally, yesterday was also the birthday of Johannes Brahms and the death date of Sir James George Frazer, early anthropologist and author of The Golden Bough.

Around Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Frazer in my mind clustered Charles Dickens, Sigmund Freud, and a number of other nineteenth-century figures I’ve carried around intellectually for years. And suddenly, on May 7, a series of connections I’d never fully considered began to take shape, leading to this essay.

These historic figures worked in different fields and had very different temperaments. But they seem to have been circling the same question from different directions. What lies beneath the order of civilized life?

Frazer searched across world mythologies for recurring patterns of ritual and symbolic life. Freud argued that civilized behavior rested atop unconscious drives and suppressed desires. Dickens explored the emotional loneliness and moral confusion of industrial society. Brahms and Tchaikovsky transformed inherited folk material and raw feeling into symphonic and theatrical forms.

Different fields, same instinct: something still stirs beneath the veneer of civilization.

Pilgrimages to the Nineteenth Century

I’ve been lucky enough to encounter several of them in person, in a way. I visited Tchaikovsky’s country home in Klin. Klin also has a rather creepy Christmas museum, which fits this essay better than I would have expected.

Nutcracker at the Christmas museum in Klin, Russia, near Tchaikovsky’s country home.

I saw Swan Lake performed in Saint Petersburg, finally enjoying a balletic score that was frustratingly truncated in the film Billy Elliot.

I also pilgrimaged to Freud’s apartment in Vienna. Its rooms are still there, along with photographs, artifacts, and parts of his collection of antiquities. The famous couch is now in London, where Freud brought it when he fled the Nazis in 1938. Paradoxically, its absence from Vienna calls attention to its importance in Freudian lore. You walk through the apartment imagining what Freud thought and did there, which is surely what the museum intends.

I taught critically about Freud’s Totem and Taboo for years at University of Michigan. And one of the most genuinely moving musical experiences I can remember was hearing Brahms’s Second Symphony in Melbourne, where I had gone for touristic reasons that had nothing to do with Brahms. I had not planned to attend a concert when I visited the art museum, but on entering we discovered that visitors were invited to an afternoon performance of that stirring orchestral work.

Frazer and the Survival of Ritual

Let us now return to Frazer.

Modern anthropologists rightly criticize a great deal of his work. He relied heavily on secondhand reports, many gathered by colonial administrators and missionaries who had their own agendas and misunderstandings. He also made sweeping comparisons that scholars today would approach much more cautiously. I am not arguing for a Frazerian revival.

But The Golden Bough remains an ambitious and imaginative work. Frazer believed that modern societies continued to carry remnants of ancient symbolic systems, often without realizing it. Rituals survive long after their original meanings fade. Seasonal ceremonies, myths of rebirth, sacrificial dramas, magical thinking: these things do not simply disappear. They sink below the surface and return in altered forms.

Once you start thinking this way, you begin to see it everywhere.

Take Christmas. Much of what modern Americans feel about Christmas, the emotional texture of it, the imagery associated with it, the sense of what the season is supposed to mean, owes an enormous and largely unacknowledged debt to Dickens and Tchaikovsky.

Dickens, especially through A Christmas Carol, helped create the modern sentimental and family-centered vision of the holiday. Redemption, generosity, nostalgia, the warmth of childhood remembered from the cold distance of adulthood. Before Dickens, Christmas in England had declined in importance in many places. He helped reinvent it as an emotional anchor for industrial society, which badly needed one.

Tchaikovsky, through The Nutcracker, gave Christmas much of its sound and ceremonial atmosphere.

Every December, significant numbers of American families participate in what may be seen as part of a ritual cycle. Children dress up. Families gather. Audiences return year after year to the same music, costumes, choreography, and story. The plot hardly matters. Nobody attends The Nutcracker because they are curious how it ends. They go because going has become part of what winter means.

Frazer would have recognized this immediately. In his terms, The Nutcracker functions as a modern ceremonial performance tied to the winter cycle. It blends fantasy, transformation, childhood, collective participation, and the repetition that gradually turns an event into tradition. The details are nineteenth-century European confections. The structure underneath is probably much older.

The Persistence of Magical Thinking

What I find remarkable is how durable these symbolic systems are. We live in a society that often, but decreasingly, prides itself on being secular, rational, and modern, yet every December we dress our daughters in velvet and take them to watch a little girl dream about a kingdom ruled by a magical nutcracker.

We do it because our parents did it, and their parents did it. Somewhere in the middle of all this, we may feel something powerful that lacks a simple name.

The forms change. The underlying human needs remain stubbornly familiar.

Freud fits in here, too. He believed that modern people remain far more governed by the power of magical thinking than they like to admit. Lucky rituals, superstitions, dream symbolism, obsessive routines, irrational feelings of guilt: these are not confined to distant societies or ancient history. They persist in modern life, often beneath the notice of the people acting them out. Freud and Frazer approached the issue differently, but both suspected that rational civilization rested atop much older symbolic and emotional layers.

I think about this when I remember standing in Freud’s apartment. The place has become a secular shrine, which Freud himself probably would have found amusing. Visitors move through it quietly and a little reverently, the way people move through spaces they regard as sacred. Anthropologists study pilgrimage in religious societies. Modern intellectual life has its own version: the author’s or composer’s house, the archive, the concert hall, the museum gallery with the original manuscript under glass. We want to be near where the thinking happened.

Freud's apartment in Vienna.

Maybe that is why I can now perceive Klin and Vienna and Melbourne as parts of the same story when I look back at them. The nineteenth century did not really end in 1900. It went underground, the way Frazer thought old symbolic systems do, and it continues to surface in how we organize our emotional lives, what music moves us, what holidays we celebrate, and what stories we tell our children.

The calendar gave me the occasion. The rest I’ve been carrying around for years.