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.
