Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
The first Sugar Plum Fairy was Antonietta Dell'Era. She was a good technician, but Tchaikovsky's brother Modest described her as pudgy and unattractive. Although the Sugar Plum Fairy is the prima ballerina of The Nutcracker, she has very little dancing to do. This was a considered a major defect among early critics. Dell'Era tried to expand the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy in later performances by putting a gavotte by Czibulka into the score.