The duopoly of Christmas music is probably Mariah Carey or Tchaikovsky. In Chicago’s airport bathroom, plays a pop-mashed Super Plum Fairy variation in the airport bathroom. The violin carries the melody and the background adds drums (jesus, that is aweful). Remember, the OG composition is supposed to use a celesta, which Tchaikovsky pioneered its use in Orchestra and soon becomes viral:
The Revolutionary Sound at the Heart of a Holiday Classic
The celesta [was] invented by the Parisian organ-maker Auguste Mustel in 1886. It is smaller than the piano, almost a toy by comparison, and with a less expansive keyboard… Picture a glockenspiel, a mainstay of orchestral percussion sections, hidden inside a piano.
Tchaikovsky heard the celesta in Paris while on his way to the United States … and described the experience in an 1891 letter to his publisher:
I discovered a new orchestral instrument in Paris, something between a miniature piano and a Glockenspiel, with a divinely wondrous sound. … The instrument is called the “Celesta Mustel” and costs 1,200 francs. It can be obtained only from its Paris inventor, M. Mustel. I’m hoping you’ll order this instrument for me.
In Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky unleashed the instrument’s full potential. In “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” he at first treats it almost as a piano, with . No longer background color, the celesta becomes, for the first time, the center of attention.
And then Celesta’s orchestra career takes off: Mahler, Richard Strauss, Gershwin.
In the 21st century, the celesta may be most closely associated with a work of fantasy that rivals “The Nutcracker” in popularity: the Harry Potter films.
The film adaptation of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” opens with the defining musical motif of the series, a You could describe this tune with the same language you would use for “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”: toylike in its fun and transporting in its allure. Above all, it is magical.
Instruments have a way of quickly conjuring moods and images, and that’s largely because of how they’ve been used in the past. The English horn is nostalgic; the French horn, noble. And if “Hedwig’s Theme” immediately brings the world of magic to mind, that association was planted by Tchaikovsky well over a century ago in “The Nutcracker.”
MERRY CHRSITMAS, and may magic and love be with you for 2026 :)