March from The Nutcracker

What you get, immediately after purchase
📄 The sheet music as a PDF, printable and readable on a tablet
🎧 The MP3 audio recording, to learn the piece by ear
✉️ A download link by email, with no account to create

This score is 3 pages long.

The March opens the first act of The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky's ballet first staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg in December 1892: it is Christmas Eve, and the Stahlbaum children parade around the lit-up tree as the guests arrive. Audiences had already heard it a few months earlier in the orchestral suite drawn from the ballet, and it has never left the year-end concerts and shows since. Its little opening fanfare, made of short, bouncing chords, comes back like a refrain that everyone recognises from the very first bar. Between level 3 and level 5, the difference lies mainly in the bass, which calls for greater mobility at level 5, as you can see in the second system of the preview. A festive tune to bring out as soon as the tree is up.