Non-sense latin in Alexander Nevsky.

Posted by Ahmed Anzaldúa on October 3, 2008. 5 comments

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.