After several film successes from 1924-29, Eisenstein was granted a leave of absence to travel outside Russia. During his travels, he immersed himself in the filmmaking establishments of Hollywood and Europe, refining his theories about the art and aesthetics of filmmaking. When he returned to Russia in 1932, he found that many changes had taken place, not the least of which was that the film industry was now an organized arm of the state, and for the next five years he was regarded as something of an outcast. When he was approached by the government in 1937 to make a film about the Russian hero Alexander Nevsky–and to keep in mind its relevance to the current Russian threat from Nazi Germany–he hesitated only briefly. He was very eager to involve Prokofiev in his plans for the film.
The figure of Alexander Nevsky looms large in Russian history, and he is one of very few heroes to survive the numerous changes in Russia’s social, political, and religious system during the past 100 years.
For many centuries the history of Russia was a chronicle of its battles to prevent the incursion of its neighbors on all sides–Turks, Mongols, Swedes, Germans, Poles–onto Russian soil. In addition to fearing their enemies’ plunder of the country’s resources, Russians feared the introduction of “foreign” beliefs such as Islam, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism into Russian Orthodox life. Generations of Russian Tsars had fought off invaders with some success, but their names held echoes of oppression, in 1937, for the newly established Russian proletariat. On the other hand, the 13th century prince, Alexander Nevsky, who had twice saved Russia from the barbarians and had been canonized after his death, was a figure above politics.
Prince Alexander of Novgorod earned the name Nevsky when he won the first of these decisive battles against the invading army of Sweden at the River Neva in the year 1240. His later victory, and the one which Eisenstein deals with in the film Alexander Nevsky, came when the prince succeeded, with the help of an army of peasants, in overcoming the advance of the Teutonic knights into Russian territory in 1242.
Prokofiev had studied the examples of medieval music that Eisenstein had sent him before their first meeting, and in short order, the two decided what would, or would not, work in the context of the film: how it should differ for the Russians and for the Teutonic knights; whether there should be deliberate sound distortions for the battle scenes; and whether music or image should set the pace for a given scene. Ultimately, Eisenstein and Prokofiev employed various methods for scoring the images. Sometimes the music was composed first and the editing done to the rhythm of the music; sometimes Prokofiev would compose to fit the rhythm of an edited sequence.
The film premiered to resounding applause on December 1, 1938, and Prokofiev lost no time adapting his music to a concert version cantata form, which he premiered the following March.
When John Goberman first heard Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata, he was a cellist in the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowsky. Later, as a Russian major at Columbia University, he saw the film of Alexander Nevsky at Manhattan’s Thalia movie house and was struck by the extraordinary difference between the Alexander Nevsky cantata as played by a full orchestra and the decidedly inferior quality of the musicianship and soundtrack of the film.
But Goberman, the Emmy award-winning producer of “Live From Lincoln Center”, also realized that he was seeing something very unusual on the screen, namely, “a film score that was not background music. Prokofiev and Eisenstein together created something special. The music is as important as the picture in Alexander Nevsky, and the way the film was constructed was based on that idea.”
Considering that the original soundtrack of Alexander Nevsky was recorded by 30 studio musicians–who Goberman thinks were “having a bad day” and André Previn said “sounded as if they were recording in a phone booth”–the substitution of the 80-100 musicians in a symphony orchestra plus full chorus makes for an immensely powerful performance.
“When we see a typical print of Nevsky,” says Goberman, “we have three levels of obscurity going. First, you have a 1938 optical soundtrack, so it’s going to sound terrible; second, you have a very small studio orchestra that’s playing; and third, the studio orchestra played very badly. I like to think that what we’re doing is restoring a great masterpiece–stripping away the technological limitations of a 1938 soundtrack, reconstructing the score so that it can be played, and having people play it well.”
Goberman’s first task in getting the project under way was to locate a good print of Alexander Nevsky, which turned out to be no mean feat. The best available print with English subtitles was still of lesser quality than the producer had hoped for, so he decided that if he was going to work from a Russian-language print, then it should be the best one possible. Eisenstein’s original nitrate negative rested in the cautious hands of Moscow film archivists, and the producer was not sure whether he could have a new print struck from it, but he decided to try.
Working with Corinth films, the distributor of Alexander Nevsky in America, Goberman kept up an unflagging campaign of letters and phone calls in pursuit of the print. It was a long process, and before he knew the outcome, the score had been finished, the orchestra negotiations concluded, and almost every other detail of the event was in the works. Finally, an agreement was reached with the film archive, and an emissary/friend was dispatched to Moscow with a check to cover the cost of making the print.
“When I saw it,” Goberman says, “I knew that it had been worth the trouble. Fifty years is about the age when nitrate film starts to break down, and I honestly think that we have gotten the last, best print of Alexander Nevsky. It has the original quality and richness that Eisenstein must have seen when he first viewed it; the gradations of shade in the images are so beautiful that it makes you wish films were still in black and white. Considering the age of the film, there will never ever be a better print than this one.”
Even before he knew whether he’d obtain an archival print of the film, however, Goberman knew that he would have to deal with the problem of subtitles. A number of years earlier, he had been stumped by the problem of televising a foreign opera to an American audience who didn’t know what the characters were saying. With the help of Sonya Friedman, who is considered the world’s best subtitler, he solved the problem. The two had collaborated since so it was natural that Friedman would agree to work on Nevsky. The method that was used to good advantage for opera productions (titles projected above the stage) became a jumping-off point for their work on the film.
“I thought it might be interesting,” Goberman said, “if, instead of interfering with the frames in the picture, we used the technique of putting subtitles off-screen, below the frame of the picture.” With help from Friedman, who worked from three Russian translations and was careful to keep the subtitles in character, always reflecting the feeling of the action, Goberman was able to do just that. The changes in the subtitles were automatically cued by a computer sequence recorded as one of the tracks.
The main reason for creating a concert version of Alexander Nevsky is that, while the original studio film score and parts are unavailable (and, in any case useless for concert hall symphonic performance), the composer’s own transcription for full symphony orchestra does exist in the Alexander Nevsky cantata. In the cantata, Prokofiev not only expanded the small studio orchestra score for concert hall performance, he condensed some of the material by eliminating repeated motifs. Thus, the 60 minutes of music in the film was reduced to 40 minutes in the cantata. It was therefore necessary to put back the repeats based on the cantata orchestration and change key signatures so that the 200 members of the orchestra and chorus would have a film score that is bar-for-bar identical to the original score, but orchestrated for concert halls in Prokofiev’s own hand.
Working from a videotape of the film and using the cantata as a reference point, musician/conductor/orchestrator/arranger William D. Brohn painstakingly reworked the score of Alexander Nevsky. The most difficult task was taking down in musical notation the few bits of music that didn’t exist in the cantata. Brohn said, “Prokofiev’s music is complicated to begin with, but the quality of the soundtrack made it more difficult” Using the cantata as a reference point, Brohn was able to satisfy himself that his reworking was authentic.
Finding the orchestras that could do justice to Prokofiev’s music was, according to Goberman, a bit easier than Brohn’s task had been. “One of the reasons we could make this project work,” said the producer, “is that the Alexander Nevsky cantata, which Prokofiev based on the film score, is a piece of music that major orchestras play as part of their standard repertory.”
