The story of the film music by Sergei Prokofiev began early in January 1941, when Sergei Eisenstein received a commission from the State Cinema Committee to make a film about Ivan the Terrible.
Prokofiev and Eisenstein first worked continuously on the project after they had been evacuated to Alma Ata, between July 1942 and June 1943, though the composer travelled to Moscow at the beginning of winter in 1942. Prokofiev began to write the music without waiting for work on the film to start, and relied heavily on the detailed stage directions and drawings supplied by Eisenstein.
The present edition is based on Prokofiev's original scores and on the scores which Pavel Lamm wrote for Paris in 1947, and during the synchronization of the film in 1944-46 (Prokofiev was the member of the authorship society) and was going to despatch the score.