The Nutcracker
In the biography Tchaikovsky, writer David Brown points out that Tchaikovsky was not happy with The Nutcracker and complained to his friends about the difficulty of setting the tale to music. Brown asks why Tchaikovsky would ever let himself be persuaded to accept the story as the subject for a ballet. He points out that Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty were "dramatically meaty and deeply serious" while The Nutcracker was "trite ... [and] pointless." The ballet has no true climax he writes. He then asks, "What was it all about anyway? The Nutcracker is meaningless in the profoundest sense." He decides that the ballet is the "most inconsequential" of all the composer's mature works for theatre, and "its dramatic structure the least satisfactory." While Brown never gives his approval to The Nutcracker'', he thinks Tchaikovsky did a remarkable job despite the "appalling limitations of the subject."