The Nutcracker and the Mouse King
Narrated by Elizabeth Grace
On Christmas Eve, young Marie falls for an ugly wooden doll in The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, E.T.A. Hoffmann's dark fairy tale behind the ballet.
Marie's godfather Drosselmeyer, an old clockmaker with a talent for strange and clever toys, brings the Stahlbaum children a wooden nutcracker on Christmas night. Marie loves him at once, even after her brother Fritz cracks his jaw. Once the house goes quiet and the candles burn low, the toys wake up. A seven-headed Mouse King leads his army out of the walls, and the nutcracker rallies the toy soldiers to hold them back. Marie throws her slipper into the fight and is hurt for her trouble.
While she recovers, Drosselmeyer tells her the story behind the curse: a beautiful princess turned ugly by the Mouse Queen, and the young man who broke the spell only to be cursed himself, trapped in a nutcracker's body until someone could love him as he was. Marie starts to wonder if her own nutcracker is more than a toy, and whether the mice will let him go so easily. The Mouse King keeps coming back with new demands, and Marie must decide how far she'll go to protect a friend nobody else believes is real.
This is the strange, dreamlike original behind the famous ballet, part Christmas story and part gothic fairy tale, with toy soldiers, a wicked mouse court, and a curse waiting to be undone. It's good listening for anyone who loves old-fashioned holiday tales with a darker edge, or who grew up on the Nutcracker music and never knew the stranger book it came from.
Built for winding down rather than staying up, the telling lets the candlelight and the mouse-scratched walls blur into the background. Drift off somewhere around the second act.
