Composers can be petty too, as Prokofiev shows by having his rivalry with Stravinsky come through in his score for Eisenstein's movie Alexander Nevsky and the corresponding cantata. My school's choir and my wife's orchestra have now been rehearsing it for a while, so it has been on my mind lately.
If you have not seen the original film, here it is in its entirety (with a severely damaged audio track):
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3081784922766209878]
The choir part that accompanies the Teutons is supposedly a medieval pilgrim's chant, but it is really complete non-sense. Prokofiev searched in the Moscow conservatory library for medieval chants, but they sounded all pretty bland and boring in the context, so he decided to come up with something better. He used the Latin text: "Peregrinus expectavi, pedes meos in cymbalis" which could be translated as "We wanderers look forward to having our feet covered with cymbals". Morag G. Kerr, a soprano in the BBC Symphony Chorus found what I think is the real origin of this text: Prokofiev being petty and taking a jab at his rival, Stravinsky. Read all about it here.
Hi. Well done for being the third person to spot my little Nevsky letter and mention it on the net. I'm amusing myself keeping tabs on the silly translations which still get trotted out for this phrase, and amazed that nobody seems to have noticed the Stravinsky connection independently.
ReplyDeleteCan I ask how you spotted the reference to my letter? It's just that the link to the JSTOR archive version seems to have vanished without trace, and my own page never seems to make it near the top of the Google listings.
Love your groovy cat pics, by the way.
Morag.
Hi. I read about the Stravinsky connection in the Wikipedia entry for the cantata (which I think you edited). From there I just followed the links and did a quick Google search.
ReplyDeleteKudos on finding the connection, a lot of musicologists out there should be jealous.
Yes, I decided to stick a reference into Wikipedia a couple of months ago, after having repeated a Google search (first done in 2003) to find that people were still puzzled by the words, and still trying to construct spurious translations. A couple of people cited the JSTOR-archived article (which at the moment seems to be missing in action) earlier this year, but you are the first evidence I've had that the Wiki edit has been noticed.
ReplyDeleteI spotted the connection while rehearsing for the Stravinsky (in 1994), and once the penny had dropped my main reaction was "just shoot me now!" My embarrassment as to how long it took me to notice it is only matched by my incredulity that nobody else seems to have done so. Especially given the rarity of the word "cymbalis" in choral music, combined with the fact that there always seems to be a heated discussion about how to pronounce it.
In 2003, when it first occurred to me to do a Google search, the first thing that struck me was that the first page of returns was a 50/50 mix of pages relating to Nevsky and the Stravinsky. This is less so now, with the Stravinsky tending not to appear until the second page, but at that time the Google page itself seemed to me to be an enormous clue.
I hope your school performance is going well. I always found Nevsky a lot of fun to perform. Are you doing it in translation, or making these poor children learn it in Russian?
They are doing it in Russian. The choirmaster is Armenian so, even if they don't know what they're saying, at least they're pronouncing it correctly.
ReplyDeleteThe performance was yesterday, they did parts of the film score while the movie was projected on a screen.
Even though I'm surprised at how no musicologist has picked up on the connection yet, by the musicologists I do know, they wouldn't be interested in a finding like this, unless you managed to dress it up in really non-practical academic jargon.
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