Tuesday, December 22

[dirac]

An ancestor of Margot Fonteyn figures heavily in a 19th century Glasgow murder case.

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William and Annie had a daughter, Evelyn Maud Acheson, who had an affair with Antônio Gonçalves Fontes, a Brazilian merchant, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Hilda Fontes in Derbyshire, in early 1895.

 

[dirac]

A look at the original E.T.A. Hoffman Nutcracker tale.

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Hoffman’s darker tale was adapted into a lighter version by Alexander Dumas. This adaptation caught the attention of ballet masters at the Mariinsky Theater in Russia. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was commissioned to compose music for the first ballet production of The Nutcracker in 1892. Although Tchaikovsky’s music was a success, the performance fell short of pleasing its audience. Critics felt the fairy-tale-like narrative undermined the artistic agency of classical ballet. One critic wrote that The Nutcracker was “‘produced primarily with children for children with ‘precisely nothing’ to contribute to ‘the artistic fate of our ballet.’”