• 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

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).

Audiences have long enjoyed Sergei Prokofiev's musical score for Alexander Nevsky, a historical film that cast a thirteenth-century Russian victory over invading Teutonic Knights as an allegory of contemporary Soviet strength in the face of Nazi warmongering. The cantata that Prokofiev derived from the score has proven even more popular and remains one of his most-performed works. This critical companion explores this music and the ways in which it has engaged listeners, performers, and artists throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tracing its path from state propaganda to repertory classic.