Analysis
The Latin words chanted by the Teutonic knights—"Peregrinus expectavi, pedes meos in cymbalis (A pilgrim – I waited – my feet – upon the cymbals)"—seem at first sight to be meaningless. Prokofiev himself referred to the knights as "sing Catholic psalms, as they march into battle". The words are indeed from the Psalms, specifically from the Vulgate texts chosen by Igor Stravinsky for his 1930 Symphony of Psalms. An explanation for this choice may be found in the lifelong rivalry between the two Russian composers, specifically in the younger man (Prokofiev's) dismissal of Stravinsky's idiom as backward-looking "pseudo-Bachism", and his disdain for Stravinsky's choice to remain in western Europe, in contrast to Prokofiev's own return to Stalinist Russia in 1935. As has been observed by Dr Morag G. Kerr, then a soprano with the BBC Symphony Chorus, he may have felt a temptation to put the words of his long-time rival into the mouths of the one-dimensional Teutonic villains of Eisenstein's film.
The suggestion is implicitly accepted by the BBC: "Even their words are gibberish, with Prokofiev rather mischievously creating them by chopping up Latin texts from Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and then randomly stringing them together".
The Latin Peregrinus phrase Prokofiev concocted ends with 'est' which is not found in Symphony of Psalms, but possibly is a pun on the first letters of Stravinsky's surname in Latin (Prokofiev enjoyed such games). Dr Kerr's observation is acknowledged as the first in print, and is accepted and developed.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Nevsky (Prokofiev)
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