Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and Soviet Film by Kevin Bartig (review)

Prokofiev's art or 'serious' music is well-documented and performed regularly in concert halls worldwide. However, relatively little is known about his contribution to film music, except for his collaborations with Sergei Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, including Eisenstein's oft-cited graphic score featuring seventeen bars of Prokofiev's music for the former pictured with the corresponding film stills. Bartig's book, based on his 2008 Ph.D. thesis, is a comprehensive guide to Prokofiev's total output of film music, including his scores for aborted film projects and his adaptations of his own film scores for the concert platform. The book is a very welcome addition to knowledge about the man and his music and provides a deeper insight into the world of Soviet film composition, adding to the recent surge in interest in non-Western film music.

The main theme explored throughout the book, introduced clearly in the introduction, is Prokofiev's struggle to compose 'music for the masses' whilst retaining his established artistic integrity, in other words, how did Prokofiev reconcile serious music with film? Bartig uses a variety of sources to answer this question, notably archive material stored in Moscow that was not available outside the Soviet Union before its dissolution in 1991, making this book extremely valuable in that it provides a rounded and realistic picture of the composer and his film music output. Bartig draws upon a variety of literature to reinforce his argument, perhaps relying a little too heavily on Simon Morrison's book on Prokofiev, The People's Artists: Prokofiev's Soviet Years. Composing for the Red Screen, which is aimed at academics and students, and the general educated reader with an interest in Prokofiev and Soviet film music, and Bartig explains in the introduction the changing attitudes (for the better) to the erstwhile academic bias against film music.

The opening pages contain an atmospheric description of the first screening of a sound film in the Soviet Union in 1930, which sets the scene appropriately, and demonstrates the levels of excitement on the part of the Soviet population at the prospect of watching films not only with dialogue but also music. The introduction also explains that Prokofiev, who was living in Paris whilst he composed his first film score, was asked to write a 'film symphony' for Eisenstein's 1925 production Battleship Potemkin; Prokofiev was reluctant since he didn't want to be labelled a Bolshevist. This leads the reader to wonder exactly what the composer's political leanings were, particularly since this could shed more light on his attitudes towards composing music for the masses, yet this theme isn't analysed in as much detail as it could have been within this book.

Chapter 1 covers the music for the 1934 production of Lieutenant Kizhe, the music of which will be familiar to most readers through Prokofiev's concert adaptation of the film score, the 'Lieutenant Kijé Suite'. The chapter begins with an account of Prokofiev's trip to the USA in 1930, which resulted in Gloria Swanson offering him the opportunity to score her latest movie. The commission did not materialise due to circumstances and disagreements about fees but the encounter did lead Prokofiev to think deeply about producing music for the masses whilst maintaining his own musical voice, resulting in music that came to be termed 'new simplicity'. The chapter continues with transcriptions and descriptions of the music, which illustrate clearly the development of this style. Furthermore, Bartig presents information on Prokofiev's emerging interest in recording technology, another legacy of the composer's Hollywood trip, which informed his thinking behind the composition of later film scores. There are some insightful peeks into Prokofiev's character through snippets from his journal and accounts of his process of composition in isolation from the film studio, since he lived in Paris at the time. Although very interesting, some contextual information on how usual or otherwise this...