The Nutcracker Trivia
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94 free The Nutcracker trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free The Nutcracker trivia questions with answers. The Nutcracker is performed more often than any other ballet, and almost none of it happened the way audiences assume. These 94 questions cover the 1892 premiere that flopped, the concert suite that succeeded first, the brand-new instrument Tchaikovsky imported for one three-minute dance, and the 1954 American staging that turned the whole thing into a Christmas institution. There are questions on the source material too — E. T. A. Hoffmann's genuinely strange 1816 tale, the seven-headed Mouse King, the long story-within-a-story that ballet companies always cut — and on the carved wooden dolls from the Ore Mountains that gave the story its title character. Every answer was checked against a primary reference before publication, so the dates, names and details here are accurate. It works as a solo quiz, a programme-interval argument, or a round for a company that has just done its thirtieth December in a row.
30 of 94 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1940 Disney film set Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite to dancing mushrooms, fairies and fish?
Fantasia
Fantasia. Its Nutcracker sequence drops the suite's overture and march, and its animator is said to have modelled the dancing mushrooms on the Three Stooges.
Q 02Who danced the children's roles at The Nutcracker's 1892 premiere?
Students
Students of the company's ballet school took the children's parts, and not until a Moscow staging of 1919 did the heroine first go to an adult dancer.
Q 03At which theatre was The Nutcracker first performed in 1892?
The Imperial Mariinsky
The Imperial Mariinsky Theatre staged it for the tsar's ballet company, whose veteran ballet master Marius Petipa planned every scene and then had to leave the steps to his assistant.
Q 04Which choreographer took over The Nutcracker when Marius Petipa fell ill?
Lev Ivanov
Lev Ivanov, Petipa's longtime assistant, was put in charge by the director of the Imperial Theatres when illness took the older man out of the production in 1892.
Q 05The Nutcracker's plot comes from an 1844 French adaptation by which writer?
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas published his lighter French retelling in 1844, and Petipa's libretto followed the Dumas version rather than the German original.
Q 06Who wrote the 1816 German tale from which The Nutcracker ultimately derives?
E. T. A. Hoffmann
E. T. A. Hoffmann published Nussknacker und Mausekönig in Berlin in 1816 in a book of children's stories; in his telling the toy carries the girl off to a kingdom of dolls.
Q 07What is The Nutcracker's heroine called in the original German tale?
Marie Stahlbaum
Marie Stahlbaum is the girl in the original tale; the French retelling renamed her family Silberhaus, and the name most ballets give her belongs in the original to one of Marie's dolls.
Q 08What are Drosselmeier's occupations in the original Nutcracker tale?
Judge, clockmaker and inventor
Judge, clockmaker and inventor: the children's godfather sits on a high court, yet he turns up each Christmas with clockwork marvels he has built himself, such as a castle full of moving figures.
Q 09How many heads does the Mouse King have in the original Nutcracker tale?
Seven
Seven heads sit on the Mouse King in the 1816 tale; he inherits a grudge from his mother, the mouse queen whose curse turned a young man into the nutcracker.
Q 10Mark Morris's 1991 take on The Nutcracker is named after which story-within-a-story that most ballets cut?
The Hard Nut
The Hard Nut. The inner tale explains how the nutcracker came to be cursed, and Morris put it back in a staging styled after the comic-book artist Charles Burns.
Q 11Which instrument gives the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy its famous sound?
The celesta
The celesta was a brand-new find: Tchaikovsky came across it in Paris, wrote home about its 'divinely wonderful sound' and had his publisher order one for 1,200 francs.
Q 12Who invented the bell-toned keyboard heard in the Sugar Plum Fairy's dance, and when?
Auguste Mustel in 1886
Auguste Mustel in 1886 patented the instrument in Paris, where his family built harmoniums; Tchaikovsky heard it there in 1891 and ordered one through his publisher.
Q 13How does the keyboard heard in the Sugar Plum Fairy's dance produce its sound?
Hammers strike metal plates
Q 21Which nickname belongs to Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, which he conducted nine days before his death?
Pathétique
Pathétique. He led its first performance in October 1893, a year after The Nutcracker opened, and the symphony's dying-away finale later fed the rumours about how he died.
Q 22What is Tchaikovsky's death in 1893 usually attributed to?
Cholera from unboiled water
Cholera from unboiled water is the official account: during an epidemic he is said to have drunk a glass of it at a restaurant, and he died days later aged 53, though suicide theories soon surfaced.
Q 23Which was the first of Tchaikovsky's three ballets?
Swan Lake
Hammers strike metal plates, each hung over a wooden resonator that mellows the ring, so the instrument is played just like a piano.
Q 14Which composer named the Sugar Plum Fairy's keyboard instrument in a 1936 work's title?
Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók wrote the piece in 1936 for the conductor Paul Sacher's chamber orchestra in Basel, and its eerie slow movement later turned up in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
Q 15In many stagings of The Nutcracker, the shepherdesses of the Dance of the Reed Flutes represent which confection?
Marzipan
Marzipan. British viewers of the 1970s knew the tune from a Cadbury advert, in which the humorist Frank Muir sang 'Everyone's a Fruit and Nut Case' to it.
Q 16In The Nutcracker's Act II, which country does the chocolate dance represent?
Spain
Spain is the chocolate dance's country, a brisk number with castanets, because chocolate first reached Europe through Spain's colonies in the Americas.
Q 17Which US city's ballet company staged America's first full-length Nutcracker on Christmas Eve 1944?
San Francisco
San Francisco. Willam Christensen staged it, and the company went on to make the ballet a yearly tradition, a decade before New York's more famous version arrived.
Q 18How was the first performance of The Nutcracker received in 1892?
It was not deemed a success
It was not deemed a success: critics attacked the libretto and the pairing of a ballet with an opera, though the Sugar Plum Fairy's dancer is said to have taken five curtain calls.
Q 19Whose 1954 staging turned The Nutcracker into an American Christmas institution?
George Balanchine
George Balanchine's staging opened at New York City Ballet in February 1954, quickly became the company's biggest box-office success and settled in as an annual fixture.
Q 20Which number closes Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite?
Waltz of the Flowers
Waltz of the Flowers ends the suite of eight numbers, which the composer conducted in concert in March 1892, nine months before the ballet itself reached the stage.
Swan Lake opened in Moscow in 1877, but the version usually danced today was revised after the composer's death for an 1895 revival.
Q 24What was unusual about Tchaikovsky's thirteen-year friendship with his patron Nadezhda von Meck?
They agreed never to meet
They agreed never to meet. The railway tycoon's widow paid him 6,000 roubles a year, enough to let him give up teaching, and the two exchanged more than 1,200 letters.
Q 25Which orchestral piece with cannon fire is among Tchaikovsky's best-known works?
The 1812 Overture
The 1812 Overture was a commission he called 'very loud and noisy' and written without love; in America it became a Fourth of July favourite after a 1974 Boston Pops concert.
Q 26Which mountain range on the German-Czech border is the traditional home of carved nutcracker dolls?
The Erzgebirge
The Erzgebirge, or Ore Mountains, turned to carving wooden toys when its mines declined, and nutcrackers became one of its best-known Christmas exports.
Q 27Traditional German nutcracker dolls are best known for depicting which figures?
Kings and soldiers
Kings and soldiers were on show from German carvers by 1800; the popular explanation is that villagers enjoyed making figures of authority do the humble work of cracking their nuts.
Q 28How did the dolls become popular in America?
Soldiers brought them home after the Second World War
Soldiers brought them home after the Second World War from postings in Germany, and the ballet's rise as an American Christmas fixture in the 1950s cemented the craze.
Q 29Which kingdom does the Sugar Plum Fairy rule in Act II of The Nutcracker?
The Land of Sweets
The Land of Sweets is where she reigns in the Prince's place until his return, and where she thanks the girl who saved him with a pageant of dancing treats.
Q 30Which Tchaikovsky work used the Sugar Plum Fairy's bell-toned keyboard before the ballet did?
The Voyevoda
The Voyevoda, a symphonic ballad premiered in Moscow in November 1891, was his first score to use the new keyboard; he tore up the manuscript after the concert.