“The entire time Tchaikovsky was composing 'The Nutcracker,' Madame Sylvie told Dara once, he was mourning his beloved sister Sasha. He reanimated her through Clara. It explained the strange heaviness of the ballet, its grand melancholy, its piercing nostalgia. And the deathlessness of its vision of childhood, of innocence and escape. Our almost unbearable awareness that everything we're seeing is disappearing even as we watch, fluttering past us as the dancers do, slipping away like smoke.

Every year, when the grand -pas de deux- -- the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince--begins, the audience's eyes fill with tears. Those shimmering sound of the celesta, like bells clear and pure, and we are flung backward. Time is conquered for a brief, luminous moment. Dara remembered one parent telling her that prayers from the Russian funeral mass were hidden in its opening bars. -We don't hear it-, he told her. -But we feel it nonetheless.-”