Famed Score for Soviet Film Given New Life : Prokofiev: The great composer’s music for the movie “Alexander Nevsky” is restored with live performances.

SAN DIEGO — “Alexander Nevsky” is one of the stellar artistic collaborations of the 20th Century. When film director Sergei Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev teamed in 1937 to make a propaganda film about the fabled 13th-Century Russian warrior, Prince Alexander of Novgorod, the potential for a motion picture masterpiece was high.

“The film is unique because it was made at the crossroads of these guys’ lives,” explained John Goberman, a New York-based television producer. Goberman is in town to oversee the San Diego Symphony’s first offering in the Soviet arts festival, a complete production of “Alexander Nevsky.”

Guest conductor Zdenek Macal will lead the orchestra and the San Diego Master Chorale in three performances of Goberman’s adaptation of the classic film in Symphony Hall for three nights, starting tonight.

However striking Eisenstein’s visual images have appeared to three generations of motion picture buffs, the faulty sound of Prokofiev’s brilliant score on the film’s inept sound track has always been a major drawback.

“Ironically, the best film score ever written is the worst score ever recorded,” observed Goberman.

He said the original sound track was made by 30 studio musicians who were not having a particularly good day and who sounded as if they were recording in a phone booth.

For a 1987 performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under then music director Andre Previn, Goberman provided a refurbished a print of “Alexander Nevsky,” excising its originally recorded musical score.

It took a year of pleading with Soviet film archivists for Goberman, the Emmy award-winning producer of “Live from Lincoln Center,” to acquire a new print of “Alexander Nevsky.”

“ ‘Nevsky’ is a sound film from which we removed the music, but we kept the sound effects--which we cleaned up--and the original Russian dialogue. We bent over backwards to make the whole thing as clean as possible.”

For the benefit of non-Russian speaking audiences, Goberman devised a way to project subtitles below the actual film screen.

“I had decided that it was not a great idea to violate these precious prints with subtitles. We devised a way to show the subtitles on a separate small screen below the main screen. The subtitles are run by a computer track we added to the print.”

The historical spectacle of Russian warriors defeating Teutonic knights in their attempt to invade Mother Russia was a politically relevant topic in the late 1930s as Hitler rearmed Germany. According to Goberman, Eisenstein translated this conflict into the idiom of the Hollywood Western.

“He picked up the film’s idea from Hollywood: cowboys versus the Indians. But, in the hands of a genius, it was no cliche.”

“When they began work on the film, both Eisenstein and Prokofiev had just returned to the Soviet Union from Hollywood. Each man wanted and needed a success. It was Eisenstein’s first sound film, which is one of the reasons the music is so important. Prokofiev’s score is definitely foreground music--not background music.”

Goberman came to know Prokofiev’s music for “Alexander Nevsky” from performances of the “Alexander Nevsky Cantata,” which the composer had carved out of his film score in 1939 for straight concert performance.

The film score contains 20 more minutes of music than the cantata. To fill in the gaps--neither orchestral parts nor a conductor’s score from the original film scoring remains--Goberman turned to musical arranger William Brohn to reconstruct the rest of the score.

“When Prokofiev wrote the cantata, he condensed the film score, taking out the many repeated sections and motives. Bar for bar, Brohn put back all the tunes Prokofiev took out, but there’s not one note in the score not by Prokofiev. We made every effort to be authentic. We even left in cues that we thought were probably mistakes.”

Goberman noted that, since the Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration on “Alexander Nevsky,” such high profile director-composer teams have been rare.

Alfred Hitchcock, for example, was partial to the work of composer Bernard Herrmann, until Herrmann refused to yield to the imperious British director’s limitations on Herrmann’s stylistic imagination. According to Goberman, the reason for the successful partnership of Prokofiev and Eisenstein was their equal standing.

“It was not a question of Prokofiev having to stand up to Eisenstein; they both respected one another from the outset.”