Christmas is around the corner! Like “Thriller” is associated with Halloween, The Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is about Christmas.
But did you know the relation between Michael Jackson and the Nutcracker?
Multiple times, the King of Pop has revealed that the famous Christmas composition has influenced him as a child but also his albums.
Michael Jackson cited Tchaikovsky as an influence in an Ebony interview. “Ever since I was a little boy, I would study composition,” Jackson said. “And it was Tchaikovsky that influenced me the most.” He wanted Thriller to have a certain similarity to The Nutcracker. “If you take an album like Nutcracker Suite, every song is a killer, every one. So I said to myself, ‘Why can’t there be a pop album where … every song [is a hit]?’ So I always tried to strive for that.”
The Nutcracker also influenced one of Michael’s subsequent albums: Dangerous. “I wanted to do an album that was like Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite,” he told Ebony. “So that in a thousand years from now, people would still be listening to it.
“Something that would live forever,” he added. “I would like to see children and teenagers and parents and all races all over the world, hundreds and hundreds of years from now, still pulling out songs from that album and dissecting it. I want it to live.”
During a 2001 interview with ABC News, the King of Pop brought up The Nutcracker again. He felt the success of Thriller cast a long shadow over his current album, Invincible. He noted that music could become popular after it’s initially considered a failure. “When The Nutcracker Suite was first introduced to the world, it totally bombed,” Michael said. “What’s important is how the story ends.”
