Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film by Kevin Bartig (review)

Abstract

Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film. By Kevin Bartig. (Oxford Music/Media Series.) York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xvi, 228 p. ISBN 9780199967599 (hardcover), $55; (e-book), various.] Music examples, figures, tables, appendix, bibliography, index. Like most composers active in the Soviet Union, Sergey Prokofiev made a significant contribution to the then-emerging genre of film music. Kevin Bartig's new book, the first full-length study of this part of the composer's legacy, includes, as its first two chapters, revised versions of his earlier essays on first two film scores: New Media, Means: Lieutenant Kizhe, which appeared in Sergey Prokofiev and His World (ed. Simon Morrison [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008], 376-400), and Restoring Pushkin: Ideology and Aesthetics in Queen of Spades, which followed (Journal of Musieology 27, no. 4 [Fall 2010]: 460-92). Only one of film scores (Ivan the Terrible) has ever appeared in print (p. 179 n. 4); the others, some of which do not even survive in full, can only be studied in manuscript in archives in Moscow, which Bartig has done extensively (pp. 4-5). The actual films Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (two parts, 1944--45), both directed by Sergei Eisenstein, as well as works derived from film scores--the suite from Lieutenant Kije (a film also known as The Czar Wants to Sleep, 1934) and the cantata Alexander Nevsky--are, of course, also easy to access, but Eisenstein's heavy editing involved manifold manipulation of the cues that Prokofiev originally wrote, and own arrangements give little clue to the peculiarities of the respective film scores (such as the almost continuous drum beat in Lieutenant Kije; p. 34). While the two Eisenstein films have canonical status and Lieutenant Kije is at least not completely forgotten, the remainder of eight completed film scores (pp. 3-4, with an instructive table) were less fortunate. The Queen of Spades (1937) and part 3 of Ivan the Terrible were never filmed, while Tonya (1942) was completed but never released; even part 2 of Ivan the Terrible (1945) was banned until 1958. The remaining three--The Partisans in the Ukrainian Steppes (1942) on a contemporary topic and the biopics Kotovsky (1942) and Lermonlov (1943)--reached the screen but did not leave a mark. Prokofiev accepted these wartime commissions mainly to sustain himself, even overcoming his aversion to catchy theme songs and overt propaganda. Tonya emerges from Bartig's discussion as the most satisfying of these films. The fees Prokofiev received for his commissions were in a range that Soviet bureaucrats could only dream of (p. 110). Leonid Maximenkov's article Prokofiev's Immortalization (in the aforementioned volume Sergey Prokofiev and His World, pp. 285-332) suggests that the bureaucrats' meddling with the work of artists was, if not prompted, then at least fueled by, sheer envy. Still, most Soviet censorship, including self-censorship, can be explained in ideological terms. Bartig delivers a vivid account of how writers altered their screenplays to please the bureaucracy and, finally, Stalin himself. Heroes of biopics became carbon copies of each other (p. 118). Some nonconformist scripts were completely scrapped, such as one by the eminent literary critic Viktor Shklovsky on the Uzbek poet and composer Hamza Hakimzade Niyazi, another film for which Prokofiev would have composed the music (p. 108). Prokofiev considered many more cinematic projects, and more often than not, he would reject them on his own for various reasons, one of them being his frustration (first expressed after the resounding success of Alexander Nevsky) about the lack of critical recognition for film music, especially in the Soviet Union (p. 101). While cinematic legacy is exclusively Soviet, Bartig reminds us that he was also in touch with Hollywood. …