Sugar Plum Sherry – The “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker & Sugarplum Fairy
https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Sugar_Plum_Sherry
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Sugar_Plum_Fairy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nutcracker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz_f9B4pPtg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarplum_Fairy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusyf6-d4mY
Sugar Plum Sherry is the proprietor of Sugar Plum Sherry’s Old-Fashioned Gummy Companions (not affiliated with Nana’s Olde Fashioned Karamelle Delights). She makes Gummies the old fashioned way and will happily give you a sample if you rescue her inventory from Nana. Nana has stolen her inventory and moved them to the logging camp in the Black Licorice Forest.
The Nutcracker is an 1892 two-act classical ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child’s imagination. The plot is an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The ballet’s first choreographer was Marius Petipa, with whom Tchaikovsky had worked three years earlier on The Sleeping Beauty, assisted by Lev Ivanov. Although the complete and staged The Nutcracker ballet was not initially as successful as the 20-minute Nutcracker Suite that Tchaikovsky had premiered nine months earlier, it soon became popular.
Since the late 1960s, The Nutcracker has been danced by many ballet companies, especially in North America. Major American ballet companies generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenues from performances of the ballet. Its score has been used in several film adaptations of Hoffmann’s story.
Tchaikovsky’s score has become one of his most famous compositions. Among other things, the score is noted for its use of the celesta.
The “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is a dance for a ballerina. It is the third movement in The Nutcracker pas de deux. This pas de deux is from Act 2 of the 1892 ballet The Nutcracker. It is danced by the principal female dancer. The number was choreographed by Lev Ivanov to music written by Tchaikovsky.
Choreographer Marius Petipa wanted the Sugar Plum Fairy’s music to sound like “drops of water shooting from a fountain”. Tchaikovsky found the ideal instrument to do this job in Paris in 1891. It was then that he came across the recently invented celesta. This instrument looked like a piano. It sounded like bells. Tchaikovsky wrote, “[The celesta is] midway between a tiny piano and a Glockenspiel, with a divinely wonderful sound.” He wanted to use the celesta in The Nutcracker. He asked his publisher to buy one. He wanted to keep the purchase a secret. He did not want other Russian composers to “get wind of it and … use it for unusual effects before me.”
Tchaikovsky introduced the celesta to Russian music lovers on 19 March 1892 when the Nutcracker Suite was performed for the Russian Musical Society in St. Petersburg. The instrument is forever identified with the Sugar Plum Fairy. It is heard in other parts of Act 2 of The Nutcracker besides the Sugar Plum Fairy’s dance. The “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is one of the ballet’s best known musical numbers. It is often “jazzed up” for television commercials at Christmas time.
Sugarplum Fairy is a pop-rock band from Borlänge, Sweden. The members took the name from a version of the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life” where John Lennon counts the song in by saying “sugar-plum-fairy, sugar-plum-fairy”. Sugarplum Fairy was founded in 1998 by brothers Victor (Viktor) and Carl Norén and by Kristian Gidlund.
The band released several demos before being signed to EMI Records in 2004, releasing the EP Stay Young to generally positive reviews. Later they released their first single, “Sweet Jackie”, from their first full-length album Young & Armed released later that year (September 29, 2004). The band toured heavily in Sweden, Japan and Germany, and released the debut album in different editions in both Japan and Germany in early 2005. In 2006 they put out their second record, “First Round First Minute”. A third album followed in 2008, including a cover of The Hollies’ “Bus Stop”. In 2009 the band went on hiatus.
The current list of all the Karamelle references can be found here.
Sugar Plum Sherry image is from Wizard101, and is (c) KingsIsle Entertainment, and is being used in a way that qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and 1892 image from The Nutcracker are borrowed from Wikipedia and are in the public domain.
Ballerina image is borrowed from Wikipedia and is shared under the CC BY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons license.
Sugarplum Fairy image by Tnarik Ennael is borrowed from Wikipedia and is shared under the CC BY-SA 2.0 Creative Commons license.
Image usage qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
Vulcan Stev's Database 