A recent viewing of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein's 1938 masterpiece, the first in several decades, served to refresh memories of some scenes, and also to puzzle me as to how I could have forgotten others. The first category included sequences buttressed by the best bits of Prokofiev‘s famous score — the doleful chorusses, the melodies reminiscent of the old Czarist national anthem, and of course, the Battle on the Ice (the frozen Lake Peipus, now bisected by the border between Estonia and Russia).
What I had completely forgotten was the monkish organist who appears several times — a grotesquely grinning, hooded figure representing the music of the Roman Catholic church, sponsor of the evil Teutonic Knights who had just taken Pskov and were threatening Novgorod. Stalin was preparing Russia for war against Germany and was willing to use Eastern Orthodoxy as a propaganda weapon, in spite of its being the „opium of the people“. That he would get into bed with Hitler and Ribbentrop a year later in order to occupy the very territory under dispute in 1242 was not yet apparent.
Prokofiev gave the organist what sounds like a lugubrious persiflage of the accompanied plainchant he must have heard in Paris. Its orchestration defies analysis, or did for me at any rate. Imagine bad Russian bassoons, didgeridoos and a male paper-and-comb chorus and you will be close enough. The performer is seen manipulating an amazingly accurate version of a 13th-century positive organ with pull-slat keys and smithy’s bellows. He gets toppled over with his instrument and his blowers when the Novgorod Peasant Army, supported by Prince Nevsky‘s cavalry, eventually triumphs after the (very) long battle sequence.
I saw that the title credits mentioned several „consultants“. My Russian is non-existent, but one of them must have been a decent musicologist. I asked John Koster how a Soviet Russian scholar of the 1930‘s could have gotten it so right. He sent me the image shown below, from a Thuringian manuscript, ex-Vienna National Library, now kept at the wonderful Archaeological Museum of Cividale del Friuli (as the Salterio di Santa Elisabetta). It was published by Georg Kinsky in his Geschichte der Musik in Bildern (Leipzig, 1929), and was thus very much of an era when German was the accepted language of European scholarship in the Soviet Union.*
As a bonus along similar tongue-in-cheek lines, my distinguished friend sent me „a less successful reconstruction of a medieval instrument, from Bergman‘s Seventh Seal. Probably based on an illustration in Curt Sachs, Handbuch der Musikinstrumentenkunde (Leipzig, 1920).“ Both shown at bottom.
April 16, 2024
*My onetime violin partner, the late and very great Mark Lubotsky, spoke German as his second language. His mother spoke French, a Czarist-era relic. His son, a scientist, spoke English.
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