Nothing could be less murderous than Tchaikovsky’s beautiful ballet, The Nutcracker. The music is enchanting, the dances perfectly choreographed—a memorable prelude to the Christmas season.
Yet as I enjoyed my daughter’s performances on a stage set up in the undulating, lush grounds of a lakeside park, all I could think about was murder. What a splendid backdrop for a mystery; what a wonderful occasion for murder!
There were three back-to-back performances. And I found myself delighted by them all, avidly watching the dancers from a seat, right in front of the stage. Naturally, I wanted to share the experience. And the best way I could think of to do it was via a murder mystery.
It was in so many ways both the perfect occasion and the perfect setting for a murder.
Emotions run understandably high during ballet and opera performances. I’d noticed that myself during rehearsals. With the stress of an upcoming performance, tempers are remarkably short and mistakes not easily tolerated.
And although this wasn’t the case for my daughter’s performance, I could imagine that the competition to snag one of the main roles might be intense. And while technical proficiency and skill would frequently win the day, it wouldn’t be uncommon for the performer’s connections with key figures to play a major role in whether a part was obtained or not.
So jealousy, envy, and humiliation could all play a part in inciting murder. One of the dancers could die, killed possibly by a fellow dancer. Or a member of the stage crew. There were lights hanging from metal bars overhead. What if they were rigged to come crashing down by a lighting or sound technician snubbed by one of the arrogant young starlets?
Then again with all eyes trained on the performance, anyone within the audience could be killed as well. Or someone in the audience could slip out, sneak backstage, and quietly kill someone.
As I surveyed the park where the stage was set up, I realized that the trees circling the grounds could easily hide a killer as well. The first performance had taken place at night, and thick shadows concealed the edges of the park. Any passerby could have wandered in, unnoticed in all the commotion of a performance.
The possibilities for both victim and killer were endless. A dancer could slip away in between dances, kill someone in the audience or some other person elsewhere, and not be missed while she was gone.
I also had plenty of leeway when it came to time period. The ballet that had inspired me was being performed in the twenty-first century. But ballet itself has an ancient history—going all the way back to the sixteenth-century when Catherine de Medici brought it from her native Florence to the French court.
Even the basic five positions that all beginning ballet dancers must master go back to the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King. It was his performance in Le Ballet de la Nuit, where he took the role of Apollo conquering the chaos of darkness that earned Louis XIV that moniker. Because of his intense interest in ballet, in particular as a mark of etiquette and nobility in court, the King had his ballet master develop a form of written notation to record dance steps.
This enabled ballet to travel from France to the rest of Europe, and it’s enabled nearly 300 dances from the Sun King’s time to be available to us today in their original form. All these fascinating tidbits come from dancer Jennifer Homans’ excellent history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels. I was so fascinated by the performance of the Nutcracker that I decided to delve into the history of ballet.
Homans’ explanation of the five basic positions and the rationale for their development helped me to understand and for the first time remember each position. My daughter’s demonstrated them to me more than once, but until I read Homans’ book, they seemed like stylized, artificial positions with no raison d’être at all.
I’d always wondered why ballet, a form one associated with the Russians, had French terms. Now we know. It’s because classical ballet took form under Louis XIV and traveled from there to the rest of Europe. The Academy of Dance he established along with several other Academies were responsible for taking French art and culture as well as the terms used to describe them to the rest of Europe.
I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn that The Nutcracker inspired not one but two murder mysteries. One is a contemporary short story called The Nutcracker Murder. It’s loosely based on the performance my daughter took part in.
The other is a Joseph Haydn Mystery—a full-length novel where I take Haydn to France, something I’ve always wanted to do. Marie Antoinette loved ballet and enjoyed Haydn’s music. She was Maria Theresa’s youngest daughter, as you might remember from Prussian Counterpoint, where the survival of the young Archduchess’s marriage prospects necessitates a trip to Frederick the Great’s Prussia and a chilling encounter with espionage.
The Nutcracker Murder has been written. The ballet-centric Joseph Haydn Mystery is next. As I read about the French court and the role ballet played in court etiquette and social status, I’m gleaning plenty of fodder for future murder mysteries.
Who knew ballet could provide such excellent material for murder?
ballet, Haydn mysteries, music history