{"id":4952,"url":"https://api.musopen.org/v2/scores/4952/","number":0,"title":"The Nutcracker (suite), Op.71a - Cellos","edition":"","piece":{"id":2204,"url":"https://api.musopen.org/v2/pieces/2204/","slug":"the-nutcracker-suite-op-71a","title":"The Nutcracker (suite), Op. 71a","description":"The Nutcracker is a two act ballet, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov and with a score by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovski (Op. 71). The libretto is adopted from E.T.A Hoffman's story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It was premiered in 1892 and, though it was not a succes, the 20-minute suite Tchaikovsky extracted from it was. Despite this, the complete Nutcracked enoyed enourmous succes later, becoming one of Tchaikovsky's most famous compositions.\nProbably scanned from a reprint edition (Kalmus, Dover, Lucks)","movements":"","composer":{"id":36,"url":"https://api.musopen.org/v2/composers/36/","slug":"pyotr-ilyich-tchaikovsky","first_name":"Pyotr Ilyich","last_name":"Tchaikovsky","date_of_birth":"7th May 1840","place_of_birth":"Votkinsk, a small town in Vyatka Governorate (present-day Udmurtia), Russia","date_of_death":"6th November 1893","description":"Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. His wide-ranging output includes symphonies, operas, ballets, instrumental, chamber music and songs. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, his last three numbered symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin. Born into a middle-class family, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant, despite his obvious musical precocity. He pursued a musical career against the wishes of his family, entering the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 and graduating in 1865. This formal, Western-oriented training set him apart from the contemporary nationalistic movement embodied by the influential group of young Russian composers known as The Five, with whom Tchaikovsky's professional relationship was mixed.","image":"https://s.musopen.org/media/images/composers/Tchaikovsky_1906_Evans.PNG","is_featured":false,"is_bookmarked":false},"form":{"id":16,"url":"https://api.musopen.org/v2/forms/16/","slug":"suite","name":"Suite","description":"In music, the terms 'suite' refers to a set of instrumental pieces, written for either a soloist. or a group of players (chamber orchestra, band, symphonic orchestra). The first suites date from the 14th century, and were often a simple set of ordered dances. By the Baroque period, though, the suite had become an important musical form, with a tonal relation between pieces. Terms that were often interchangeably used with 'suite' were 'ordre', 'partita', and sometimes 'overture'.\r\nDuring the Classical and early Romantic periods, the Suite fell out of use, with the symphony being a much more popular -and structurally coherent- type of multi movement work. The form was later revived in a slightly different form, no longer incorporating dances but simply many movements, or extracts from Operas and Ballets, or incidental music.","is_bookmarked":false},"period":{"id":54,"url":"https://api.musopen.org/v2/periods/54/","slug":"late-19th-century","name":"Late 19th century","description":"It is hard to approximate a date for the finalization of the Romantic period in music. By the mid-19th century, the underlying concepts of Romantic art had been internalized by most composers, leading to the creation of new forms. Composers as different as Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, or Franz Liszt, even as they were confronted in their understanding of music, were part of a search for the expansion of the expressive power of their art. The symphonic poem, the Wagnerian music drama, and many other forms flourished as a response to this quest for structural cohesion in music. The boundaries of tonality and consonance were pushed to the maximum, either as a way of developing the tonal system to a new state, or as a way of breaking free from it. This tendency, coupled with the steady rise of nationalist music, led to the appearance of a number of movements, tendencies, schools, etc., near the end of the 19th century. Some composers chose to return to the simplicity of the Classical forms, some chose to develop the tonal system into new forms, others focused their attention to instrumentation and timbric experimentation. This paved the way for the dissolution of the traditional tonal system and the eventual changes to the very foundation of the musical language. The transition to the next period, around the turn of the century, is also hard to define, as different tendencies progressed in different ways.\r\n\r\nSome of the iconic composers of the late 19th century period are Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, Johann Strauss, Paul Dukas, The Five (Russian school conformed by  Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin among others), and the Impressionists/Symbolist composers (such as Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy).","is_bookmarked":false},"instruments":[{"id":8,"url":"https://api.musopen.org/v2/instruments/8/","slug":"orchestra","name":"Orchestra","description":"The orchestra is an instrumental ensemble that may contain sections of string, woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments, with the occasional addition of instruments such as keyboards, harps, or electric instruments. It could be considered as the pinnacle ensemble in Western musical tradition, because of the variety and complexity of its repertoire, the rich possibilities it offers in terms of sonority, and its elastic structure and composition. The orchestra consolidated in this position during the 18th and 19th century, and the 20th and 21st centuries saw its inclusion in mass media such as film music, video game music, television, etc. \r\nOrchestras may vary in size from chamber ensembles (than can have around 50 members or less) to full sized orchestras (70-100 or more musicians). The terms 'symphonic' and 'philharmonic' are usually reserved to designate such orchestras, thought in practice this naming convention doesn't imply any real difference in terms of repertoire or composition. Orchestras can also be found attached to institutions such as colleges, either of amateur or professional character.\r\nIn the early days orchestras were often conducted by a playing musician or by a soloist, and they could even perform without a conductor. The increasing size of ensembles, the growing complexity of the music, and the refinement of musical expectations in audiences, all helped to develop the figure of the orchestral conductor, which directs the orchestra through visible hand gestures, besides playing a part in its management.","image":"https://s.musopen.org/media/images/instruments/orc.JPG","is_bookmarked":false}],"key":{"id":11,"url":"https://api.musopen.org/v2/keys/11/","slug":"b-flat-major","name":"B-Flat Major","is_bookmarked":false},"licenses":["CC-PD"],"avg_duration":22,"practice_difficulty":"hard","rcm_difficulty_level":"","rating":3.33,"hits":224629,"is_bookmarked":false},"key":null,"instruments":[],"rating":0.0,"fileurl":"https://dl.musopen.org/sheetmusic/2cc7b7a5-fc4c-4454-9892-a58454b5d290.pdf?filename=The%20Nutcracker%20%28suite%29%2C%20Op.71a%20-%20Cellos.pdf","is_bookmarked":false}