Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78 (cantata)

Program notes

About the Work

Alexander Nevsky is one of the supreme examples of music written for film that has triumphantly outlived the screen. In 1938 Prokofiev collaborated with the great director Sergei Eisenstein on a patriotic historical epic about the thirteenth-century Russian prince Alexander Nevsky, who repelled an invasion of Teutonic Knights, a story whose anti-German message was unmistakable on the eve of the Second World War. The collaboration between the two men, who greatly admired each other, was extraordinarily close, and the result is one of the landmarks of film history. The following year, in 1939, Prokofiev reshaped the score into a concert cantata for contralto, chorus and orchestra, condensing the film’s twenty-seven cues into seven movements, and it has been a repertoire staple ever since. He conducted the premiere in Moscow on 17 May 1939.

The cantata is a sequence of vivid, cinematic tableaux, and it needs no film to thrill: Prokofiev’s gift for atmosphere, for grinding dissonance and blazing diatonic splendour, makes the images leap off the stage. Its centrepiece is the colossal ‘Battle on the Ice,’ depicting the climactic clash on the frozen Lake Peipus, and its emotional heart is ‘The Field of the Dead,’ a haunting lament for solo contralto: a woman searching the battlefield for her beloved. Around them the chorus is by turns menacing (the Crusaders’ Latin chant), exhorting (‘Arise, ye Russian people’) and finally jubilant. It is mass spectacle and intimate grief in a single, gripping span.

What to Listen For

Follow the seven scenes. The cantata opens with a desolate orchestral evocation of ‘Russia under the Mongolian Yoke’: bleak, frozen, empty. The chorus then enters with the noble ‘Song about Alexander Nevsky,’ recalling an earlier Russian victory. Listen, in ‘The Crusaders in Pskov,’ for the chilling, mechanical Latin chant of the Teutonic Knights, brassy, brutal and inhuman, set against the warm, suffering music of the Russian people; and in ‘Arise, Ye Russian People’ for the rousing, bell-clanging call to arms.

The great central movement is ‘The Battle on the Ice’: a long, astonishing build from icy stillness to a furious, hammering clash between the Knights’ chant and the Russians’ themes, the orchestra depicting cavalry charges, cracking ice and chaos, one of the most exciting battle-pieces in all music. After the storm comes the cantata’s most moving page, ‘The Field of the Dead,’ where the solo contralto sings a heartbreaking lament over the fallen. Finally, ‘Alexander’s Entry into Pskov’ brings blazing, bell-crowned rejoicing, the chorus and orchestra united in triumphant celebration of the victory.