Audiences have long enjoyed Sergei Prokofiev's musical score for Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky. The historical epic cast a thirteenth-century Russian victory over invading Teutonic Knights as an allegory of contemporary Soviet strength in the face of Nazi warmongering. Prokofiev's and Eisenstein's work proved an enormous success, both as a collaboration of two of the twentieth century's most prominent artists and as a means to bolster patriotism and national pride among Soviet audiences. Arranged as a cantata for concert performance, Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky music proved malleable, its meaning reconfigured to suit different circumstances and times. Author Kevin Bartig draws on previously unexamined archival materials to follow Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky from its inception through the present day. He considers the music's genesis as well as the surprisingly different ways it has engaged listeners over the past eighty years, from its beginnings as state propaganda in the 1930s to showpiece for high-fidelity recording in the 1950s to open-air concert favorite in the post-Soviet 1990s.

Kevin Bartig is Associate Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University and author of Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Acknowledgements About the Companion Website Chapter One: Origins, Advantages, Anxieties Chapter Two: Creating a Blockbuster Chapter Three: The Thirteenth Century in Sounds Chapter Four: Nevsky Goes to War Chapter Five: From Hot War to Cold War Chapter Six: Nevsky after the USSR Appendix Further reading