Prokofiev was particularly eager to prove his commitment to the national cause. After eighteen years of living in the West, he had returned to the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Terror, in 1936, when any foreign connections were regarded as a sign of potential treachery. Prokofiev appeared a foreigner. He had lived in New York, Paris, Hollywood, and had become comparatively wealthy from his compositions for the Ballets Russes, the theatre and the cinema. With his colourful and fashionable clothes, Prokofiev cut a shocking figure in the grey atmosphere of Moscow at that time. The pianist Sviatoslav Richter, then a student at the Conservatory, recalled him wearing 'checkered trousers with bright yellow shoes and a reddish-orange tie'.153 Prokofiev's Spanish wife, Lina, whom he had brought to Moscow and had then abandoned for a student at the Literary Institute, was arrested as a foreigner in 1941, after she had refused to follow him and his new mistress when they left Moscow for the Caucasus.* Prokofiev was attacked as a 'formalist', and much of his more experimental music, like his score for Meyerhold's 1937 production of Pushkin's Boris Godunov, remained unperformed. What saved him, however, was his amazing talent for composing tunes. His Fifth Symphony (1944) was filled with expansive and heroic themes that perfectly expressed the spirit of the Soviet war effort. The huge scale of its register, with its thick bass colours and Borodin-esque harmonies, summoned up the grandeur of the Russian land. This same epic quality was to be found in War and Peace - an opera whose theme was obviously suggested by the striking parallels between Russia's war
* Sentenced to twenty years' hard labour in Siberia, Lina Prokofiev was released in 1 957. After many years of struggling for her rights as a widow she was finally allowed to return to the West in 1972. She died in London in 1989.
against Napoleon and the war against Hitler. The first version of the opera, composed in the autumn of 1941, paid as much attention to intimate love scenes as it did to battle scenes. But following criticism from the Soviet Arts Committee in 1942, Prokofiev was forced to compose several revised versions where, in direct contravention of Tolstoy's intentions, the heroic leadership and military genius of (the Stalin-like) Kutuzov was highlighted as the key to Russia's victory, and the heroic spirit of its peasant soldiers was emphasized in large choral set pieces with Russian folk motifs.154
As he was working on the score of War and Peace Prokofiev was asked by Eisenstein to compose the music for his film Ivan the Terrible, released in 1944. Cinema was the perfect medium for Prokofiev. His ability to compose tunes to order and deliver them on time was phenomenal. For Prokofiev the cinema became a sort of Soviet version of the operatic tradition in which he had been schooled under Rimsky Korsakov at the Conservatory. It gave new inspiration to his classical symphonism, allowing him free rein once again to write big tunes for grand mises-en-scene. Prokofiev's collaboration with Eisenstein had begun in 1938, when, after the disaster of Bezbin Meadow, the film director was given one more chance to please Stalin with an epic history film, Alexander Nevsky (1938), about the prince of Novgorod who had defended Russia from the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century. Prokofiev was asked by Eisenstein to write the score for his first film in sound. Under the influence of Meyerhold, the two were moving at this time toward the idea of a synthesis of images and sound - an essentially Wagnerian conception which they would apply to opera as well as to film.*
This theatrical ideal lies at the heart of their conception of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. These two epic film dramas are essen-tially cinematic versions of the great nineteenth-century history operas. In Ivan, especially, the scenes are structured like an opera, and Proko-fiev's brilliant score would not be out of place in any opera house. The
* The two men worked together with Meyerhold on the production of Prokofiev's opera Setnyon Kotko in 1939. The next year, following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Eisenstein produced Die Walkure at the Bolshoi in Moscow. See further R. Bartlet, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 271-81.
film opens with an overture whose stormy leitmotif is clearly borrowed from Wagner's Die Walkure. There are orchestrated arias and choral songs; liturgical chants; even, quite incongruously, a polonaise; and symphonic leitmotifs, or the sound of bells, which carry the emotions of the 'music drama', as Eisenstein describes it in a note outlining his new Wagnerian cinema. In the final colour scenes, where music, dance and drama are combined, there is even an attempt to reach a complete harmony of sound and colour, as Wagner had once dreamed.155
For Eisenstein these films represented a volte-face in artistic principles: the avant-garde of the 1920s had tried to take the theatre out of cinema, and now here he was putting it back in. Montage was abandoned for a clear sequential exposition of the theme through the combined effect of images and sound. In Alexander Nevsky, for example, the central idea of the film, the emotive clash between the peaceful Russians and the Teutonic invaders, is conveyed by the programmatic music as much as by the visual imagery. Eisenstein re-cut the film to synchronize the visual with the tonal images. In the famous battle scene on ice he even shot the film to match the score.156 Stalin was delighted with Alexander Nevsky. Its emotional power was perfectly harnessed to the propaganda message of heroic leadership and patriotic unity which the Soviet regime needed to boost national morale on the outbreak of war. Indeed, the subject of the film had such an obvious parallel with the Nazi threat that its screening was postponed following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.
Stalin saw Ivan the Terrible as a medieval prototype of his own statesmanship. In 1941, as Soviet Russia went to war, it seemed a good moment to remind the nation of the lessons Stalin drew from Ivan's reign: that force, even cruelty, were needed to unite the state and drive the foreigners and traitors from the land. The official cult of Ivan took off in the wake of the Great Terror (as if to justify it) in 1939. 'Our benefactor thinks that we have been too sentimental', Pasternak wrote to Olga Freidenberg in February 1941. 'Peter the Great is no longer an appropriate model. The new passion, openly confessed, is for Ivan the Terrible, the oprichnina, and cruelty. This is the subject for new operas, plays and films.'157 One month earlier, Zhdanov had commissioned Eisenstein to make his film. But Eisenstein's conception of Ivan the Terrible was far removed from the official one. The first part
of the film to emerge in his imagination was the confession scene (planned for the third and final part of the film), in which Ivan kneels beneath the fresco of the Last Judgement in the Cathedral of the Assumption and offers his repentance for the evils of his reign while a monk reads out an endless list of people executed on the Tsar's command.158
From the start, then, Ivan was conceived as a tragedy, a Soviet version of Boris Godunov which would contain a terrifying commentary on the human costs of tyranny. However, because everybody knew what Stalin did with people who made parables like this, the film's tragic nature and contemporary theme could not be revealed until the end.159 In Part One of the film Eisenstein depicts the heroic aspects of Ivan: his vision of a united state; his fearless struggle against the scheming boyars; his strong authority and leadership in the war against the Tatars of Kazan. Stalin was delighted, and Eisenstein was honoured with the Stalin Prize. But at a banquet to celebrate his triumph Eisenstein collapsed with a heart attack. Earlier that day he had put the final touches to Part Two of his epic film (not publicly released until 1958). He knew what lay in store. In Part Two the action switches from the public sphere to Ivan's inner world. The Tsar now emerges as a tormented figure, haunted by the terror to which he is driven by his own paranoia and his isolation from society. All his former allies have abandoned him, there is no one he can trust, and his wife has been murdered in a boyars' plot. The parallels between Ivan and Stalin were unmissable. Stalin, too, had lost his wife (she had killed herself in 1932) and the effect of her death on his own mental condition, which doctors had already diagnosed as paranoia and schizophrenia, no doubt contributed to the terror he unleashed.160