Which composer wrote The Nutcracker?

Tchaikovsky, in 1892, and he did not think much of it. He wrote to a friend that it was infinitely worse than Sleeping Beauty, and he had accepted the commission reluctantly - the story is thin, the second act is essentially a series of divertissements with no plot, and he was constrained by a choreographer who specified bar counts.

He wrote it while his sister was dying and travelling to Hamburg for other work, and the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is the sound of a new instrument he had found in Paris and had shipped in secret so Rimsky-Korsakov would not use it first. The celesta had been invented six years earlier and nobody in Russia had heard one.

It flopped at the premiere and became a Christmas institution only much later and mostly in America, after a 1944 San Francisco production and then Balanchine's in 1954. Many American ballet companies now earn a substantial share of their annual income from it - by some estimates around 40 per cent - which means the piece its composer considered a failure keeps the art form solvent.