The Nutcracker began as a story by a Prussian lawyer
Every Christmas, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker fills theatres, but its source was written by a Prussian civil servant who also composed music, drew savage caricatures and invented strands of horror and crime fiction. E. T. A. Hoffmann's tales inspired an Offenbach opera, the ballet Coppélia and Schumann's Kreisleriana.
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in Königsberg on 24 January 1776 into a family of lawyers; he later swapped Wilhelm for Amadeus in honour of Mozart. His parents split when he was two, and he grew up in a stern, pious household run by an uncle he nicknamed O Weh, meaning oh dear, a pun on the man's initials. He adored his aunt Charlotte, who died when he was three, and embellished stories about her so much that biographers suspected she was invented until evidence of her surfaced after the Second World War.
He showed early flair at the piano, in drawing and in writing, and attended some of Immanuel Kant's lectures in 1792 with his lifelong friend Theodor von Hippel. An infatuation with a married piano pupil ten years older than him led relatives to ship him off to a clerk's job in Glogau in 1796. Posted to Posen as a young official, he got into trouble in 1802 when caricatures of army officers circulated at a carnival ball; his punishment was disguised as a promotion to remote Płock, where he drew himself sinking in mud.
Warsaw, from 1804, gave him what he called the happiest years of his life. A fellow jurist, Julius Hitzig, introduced him to Novalis, Tieck and other Romantics whose influence marked his work profoundly. Then Napoleon's troops took the city on 28 November 1806, the Prussian administration dissolved, and Hoffmann ended up in occupied Berlin, borrowing money, going hungry and learning that his young daughter had died. Even then he composed choral canticles he later credited to his fictional musician Johannes Kreisler.
His literary legacy far outlived his careers in law and music. The Sandman is regarded as a pioneering horror story and Mademoiselle de Scuderi as one of the first crime novellas. He died on 25 June 1822, having become one of the central figures of German Romanticism and a strong influence on 19th-century writing.
Source: E. T. A. Hoffmann
