Alexander Borodin
“I am a Sunday composer.”
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people beside him ⏳🌊
- FamilyAvdotya Antonova
The mother who brought in tutors for her son born out of wedlock and even arranged his enrollment in a merchants' guild, opening the doors of the university to him.
- MentorNikolai Zinin
He drew Borodin into the chemistry laboratory, groomed him as his successor, and urged him to spend less time on music.
- FriendshipModest Mussorgsky
They first met at a military hospital in 1856 and remained friends until Mussorgsky's death in 1881; the two lie in the same cemetery.
- FamilyEkaterina Protopopova
His pianist wife, met in Heidelberg, who opened the worlds of Chopin and Schumann to him and was the dedicatee of String Quartet No. 2.
- MentorMily Balakirev
Led him, who thought of himself as an amateur, onto the path of the symphony, and conducted the premiere of Symphony No. 1.
- PatronFranz Liszt
Encouraged him in Weimar, introduced Symphony No. 1 to Germany, and received the dedication of “In the Steppes of Central Asia.”
I. The prince's son · 1833–1850 (age 0–17)
(Birth) In November 1833, Alexander Borodin was born in Saint Petersburg, in the Russian Empire (today's Russia). His natural father was Prince Luka Gedevanishvili, of a Georgian noble family, already past sixty. His mother, Avdotya Antonova, was a twenty-four-year-old commoner. Because the child was born out of wedlock, he was registered, as custom then dictated, as the son of the prince's serf Porfiry Borodin. His surname came not from his father but from a servant. (Emancipation) In 1840, when the boy was seven, the prince released him from serfdom. He provided a house for mother and son, and then died. His mother later married a retired army doctor named Kleinecke. For appearances' sake, Borodin is said to have called his mother ‘auntie’ in front of others. All her life she strove to keep her son's origins from blocking his way. (Gifts) An illegitimate child could not enter a gymnasium, so his mother brought in tutors to teach him foreign languages and music. The boy learned the piano, flute, and cello. At nine he composed a polka, and by about thirteen he had written a concerto for flute and piano. Around the same time he filled his room with jars and laboratory apparatus and made his own fireworks powder. The two paths of his life, music and chemistry, already lay side by side. (Merchant) His status stood in the way of university as well. His mother paid an official to enroll her son in the Tambov merchants' guild. Thanks to this, in 1850 Borodin was able to enter the Medical·Surgical Academy as an auditor.
II. A young man in the laboratory · 1850–1859 (age 17–26)
(Zinin) At the Academy, the man who recognized Borodin's promise was the chemist Nikolai Zinin. Zinin took him into his laboratory and groomed him as his virtual heir. Yet he is said to have admonished his music-struck pupil: “Think a little less about songs. I regard you as my successor.” Borodin heeded his teacher while still going off to amateur chamber-music gatherings to play the cello. (Military hospital) Graduating with honors in 1856, he became a resident at the 2nd Army Hospital. That autumn he first met Modest Mussorgsky, a seventeen-year-old officer of the Guards on duty there. As Borodin recalled, the dandyish young officer gracefully played passages from Verdi's “Il trovatore” and “La traviata” at an evening gathering in the hospital director's home. When they met again 3 years later, Mussorgsky played Schumann and spoke the name of Balakirev. It was then that Borodin first felt the new current in Russian music. (Doctorate) He was better suited to the laboratory than to a patient's bedside. In 1858 he received his doctorate in medicine for a dissertation on the chemical analogy between arsenic acid and phosphoric acid. (Pastime) His composing in these years went no further than some Mendelssohnian chamber music and a few songs. He regarded music strictly as a pleasure outside his profession. That self-image stayed with him all his life; later he would call himself a ‘Sunday composer.’
III. Spring in Heidelberg · 1859–1862 (age 26–29)
(Abroad) In 1859 the Academy sent him to Western Europe. Borodin settled in Heidelberg and worked in Erlenmeyer's laboratory. There he kept company with young Russian scientists such as Dmitri Mendeleev and the physiologist Ivan Sechenov. In 1860 he attended the international chemists' congress in Karlsruhe with Mendeleev. It was also around this time that he studied the reaction of bromine with silver salts. (Ekaterina) In the spring of 1861 he met Ekaterina Protopopova, a pianist from Moscow who had come to Heidelberg for treatment of tuberculosis. She loved to play Chopin and Schumann. For Borodin, who had lingered in Mendelssohn's orderly world, her playing was a door into Romantic music. Listening to music together, the two quickly grew close. (Pisa) When autumn came, her doctors urged her to go to warmer Italy. Borodin followed her as far as Pisa, where he studied fluorine compounds in the university laboratory. During this stay in Pisa he wrote the Piano Quintet in C minor, and the two became engaged. It was a rare season in which research, romance, and composition moved forward together in a single city. (Return) In the autumn of 1862 he returned to Saint Petersburg. What he had written so far was still an amateur's chamber music. But the music of Schumann, which he had come to know deeply through Ekaterina, set him dreaming of larger forms.
IV. Balakirev's circle · 1862–1869 (age 29–36)
(Balakirev) Back home, Borodin soon became an adjunct professor at the Academy. At the end of that year he met Mily Balakirev at the home of the physician Sergei Botkin, and Balakirev quickly saw that he was more than an amateur. Under his guidance Borodin began to write his first symphony. He later confessed that until he met Balakirev he had thought of himself as a mere dilettante. (Lodgings) In the spring of 1863 he married Ekaterina in Moscow. The couple lived in official quarters inside the Academy building. Friends recalled that the apartment was always crowded with relatives, students, and guests with nowhere else to go, and that cats strolled across the dinner table. Ekaterina, plagued by asthma, fell asleep late at night and rose in the daytime, and for her health she often spent long stretches in Moscow. The couple filled their time apart with letters. They had no children of their own, but took in girls from struggling families and raised them as daughters. (Salary) A professor's salary was not generous. He took on additional lectures at the Forestry Academy, but since he never spared money for relatives and students, the household was always stretched thin. (Premiere) Pressed by laboratory work, he took 5 years to finish his first symphony. The Symphony in E-flat major premiered in January 1869 under Balakirev's baton and was warmly received. Earlier, in 1867, the critic Stasov had dubbed the group gathered around Balakirev the ‘Mighty Handful.’ This group would later be remembered as ‘the Five’: Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, and Balakirev. That same year he wrote the song “The Sleeping Princess.”
A song for which Borodin wrote even the words himself after joining the Balakirev circle. Written in the same period as Symphony No. 1, it reveals his daring harmonic sense more vividly than anything else.
- From the very start, the piano accompaniment repeats chords that press two adjacent notes together (an interval of a 2nd), and this clashing sonority is never resolved. The passage paints in sound a spellbound sleep from which there is no waking.
- The words tell of a princess asleep in a dark forest, and of a hero (bogatyr) who may someday come to wake her. The vocal line circles low within a narrow range, sounding less like singing than like the voice of someone telling an old tale.
- This use of unresolved dissonance (chords that clash with one another) as color is often cited as pioneering harmony that anticipated Debussy. Listen closely to the hazy resonance the pianist's two hands create.
His first symphony, written over 5 years in the gaps between laboratory work, under Balakirev's guidance. The success of its 1869 premiere freed him from thinking of himself as merely an amateur.
- The theme that the low strings bring forth in the slow opening (introduction) of the 1st movement reappears transformed in the fast main section. Remember the first few bars, and follow how that seed grows.
- The 2nd-movement scherzo rushes along at great speed (prestissimo). In the middle section (trio) it turns to a leisurely tune, and that contrast is the pleasure of this movement.
- The 3rd-movement Andante is a slow song traded between strings and woodwinds. It is counted as the movement in which the young Borodin's lyricism shows most candidly.
- Liszt thought highly of this work and arranged for it to be performed at the 1880 music festival in Baden-Baden, Germany. With this performance, Borodin's name became known in Western Europe for the first time.
V. Prince Igor · 1869–1880 (age 36–47)
(Stasov) In 1869 Stasov handed him a draft scenario, proposing an opera on the 12th-century epic “The Tale of Igor's Campaign.” Borodin set to work eagerly, poring over chronicles and folk-song sources. But he soon lost confidence and put the project aside, carrying many of the ideas he had sketched over into Symphony No. 2. “Prince Igor” was taken up again a few years later, but it remained the unfinished task of his life. (Laboratory) His profession weighed ever more heavily. He took part in founding the Russian Chemical Society in 1868, and in 1872 he reported the aldehyde condensation reaction (the aldol reaction). In the women's medical courses that opened the same year, he taught chemistry and ardently championed women's education. Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in his memoirs that Borodin spent his days shuttling between the laboratory and the piano. It is also said that his musician friends wished him colds, since only when illness kept him from lecturing could he compose. (Comeback) Symphony No. 2 premiered in 1877 under Nápravník but met a cold reception. Borodin revised the orchestration and brought it back to the stage in 1879 under Rimsky-Korsakov. That same year the Polovtsian Dances from “Prince Igor” were performed for the first time. At the end of 1877 Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Madame von Meck, that Borodin had a strong talent but, lacking training, could not make full use of it. (Liszt) Visiting Germany in 1877, Borodin met Liszt in Weimar. Liszt praised Symphony No. 1 and urged him not to be swayed by others' advice. In 1880 Borodin wrote the orchestral piece “In the Steppes of Central Asia” for the 25th anniversary of Alexander II's accession, and dedicated it to Liszt.
A symphony that took in ideas from the shelved “Prince Igor.” It met a cold reception at its 1877 premiere and won proper recognition only in 1879, after Borodin revised the orchestration.
- At the opening of the 1st movement, the strings hammer down a heavy theme in a single voice (unison). According to the plan Borodin shared with Stasov, this movement depicts a gathering of the heroes of old Russia. Hence the work's nickname, the ‘Heroic (bogatyr)’ Symphony.
- The 2nd-movement scherzo races at great speed (prestissimo), driving each bar as a single beat. Listen for the contrast between the passage where the horns rapidly hammer a single note and the leisurely, woodwind-led middle section (trio).
- The 3rd movement opens with clarinet and harp imitating the gusli, an old Russian stringed instrument, and then a solo horn sings a long, wistful melody. Stasov interpreted this passage as the song of the bard Bayan. The horn solo is regarded as a proving ground for orchestral horn players.
- The 4th movement is a feast scene that runs on without pause. The version played today is the one Borodin reworked after the failed premiere, and the vigor piled up by the brass and percussion is especially striking.
Of the opera he never finished, this was the first part to reach the world. It premiered in 1879 under Rimsky-Korsakov's baton.
- In Act 2 of the opera, the Polovtsian Khan Konchak offers entertainment to the captive Prince Igor. A chorus originally takes part, but in concert the dances are often played by the orchestra alone, so compare the two versions.
- After the introduction, the oboe and the English horn (a woodwind lower and mellower than the oboe) sing a slow, winding melody: the ‘Gliding Dance of the Maidens.’ In 1953 this tune was reborn as the song ‘Stranger in Paradise’ in the Broadway musical Kismet.
- Soon the clarinet storms through rapid notes in the ‘Wild Dance of the Men,’ a passage that shows off the clarinetist's finger work.
- Toward the end, timpani, bass drum and cymbals drive the beat forward, and the dances pile on top of one another. According to Rimsky-Korsakov's memoirs, time ran short before the 1879 premiere, so he and Lyadov helped put the score in order.
Written for the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Alexander II's accession and dedicated to Liszt. With a chemist's precision, Borodin wove two melodies into one.
- According to Borodin's own program note, a Russian song drifts across the endless silence of the steppe. Then, with the approaching footfalls of horses and camels, a plaintive Eastern melody is heard, and a caravan escorted by Russian soldiers crosses the steppe and fades into the distance.
- As the piece begins, the violins hold a single very high note for a long time. It sounds like the sky over a steppe empty all the way to the horizon.
- The clarinet carries the Russian melody, the English horn (a woodwind lower and mellower than the oboe) the Eastern one. The steady tread of the low strings plucking with their fingers (pizzicato) represents the caravan's procession.
- In the latter part, the two melodies sound at the same time (counterpoint). This passage, where two different songs join together, is the climax of the piece, and at the end the sound dies away as though the procession were receding.
VI. The last ball · 1881–1887 (age 48–54)
(Loss) In March 1881, Mussorgsky died at the age of forty-two. The death of a friend of twenty-five years wounded Borodin deeply. That summer he wrote his String Quartet No. 2 to mark twenty years since he first met Ekaterina, and dedicated it to his wife. The lyricism running through the quartet is closer to a remembrance of the Heidelberg days than to grief. (Belgium) After Liszt introduced the First Symphony at the Baden-Baden music festival in 1880, Borodin's name began to be known in Western Europe. In Belgium, the Comtesse de Mercy-Argenteau championed his works with fervor. In 1885 Borodin watched his music performed in Liège and Antwerp, and he dedicated his piano work Petite Suite to her. That same year he met Liszt in Weimar for the last time. (Decline) Yet daily life was wearing. The government blocked new enrollment in the medical courses for women, and his wife's illness worsened. He himself came down with cholera in 1885. Prince Igor remained unfinished, and in 1886 he began a Third Symphony. (The ball) On February 27, 1887, around the carnival season (Maslenitsa), Borodin appeared at a masked ball held at the Academy wearing a red traditional Russian shirt. While talking with colleagues, he collapsed and died on the spot. He was fifty-three. He was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, close to Mussorgsky. Ekaterina died that June as well. Rimsky-Korsakov and the young Glazunov put the remaining manuscripts in order and completed Prince Igor, and the opera premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1890.
Written in the summer of the year he lost Mussorgsky, and dedicated to his wife to mark twenty years since he first met Ekaterina.
- In the third movement, Notturno (nocturne), the cello first sings the melody in its high register, and the first violin takes it over. Because Borodin, who played the cello himself, dedicated the piece to his wife, it is widely heard as a conversation between husband and wife, the two instruments trading song.
- Later in the Notturno, the violin and cello sing the same melody a beat apart (canon), the way a round works, with one voice following the one ahead of it.
- The first movement opens with the cello introducing a warm first theme and the violin answering. The second-movement scherzo is a dance that sways gently like a waltz.
- The Notturno's melody was used in the 1953 musical Kismet for the song ‘And This Is My Beloved.’ It is often played in arrangements for string orchestra, so it is worth comparing with the original for four instruments.
Lesser-known stories
In the history of chemistry, Borodin's name runs deeper than one might expect. In 1861 he reported a reaction that yields alkyl bromides by treating silver salts of carboxylic acids with bromine. After the German Hunsdieckers, a married couple, refined and published it in 1939, the reaction entered Western textbooks as the ‘Hunsdiecker reaction,’ and today it is sometimes called the ‘Borodin–Hunsdiecker reaction.’ The aldol reaction of 1872, too, he discovered independently at almost the same time as the Frenchman Wurtz. Yet it was mostly Wurtz whose name was attached. Some things have also been obscured as the image of Borodin the composer has grown. He taught chemistry in the medical courses for women that opened in 1872, and he fought for their survival when the government tried to cut them back. In music-history biographies, this work usually passes in a line or two. The 1953 Broadway musical Kismet built nearly all its songs from Borodin's melodies. The Polovtsian Dances became ‘Stranger in Paradise,’ and the Notturno of the String Quartet No. 2 became ‘And This Is My Beloved.’ When the show won the Tony Award in 1954, Borodin, sixty-seven years after his death, found himself on the list of Tony winners. The Prince Igor we hear today contains no small amount of other people's work. The overture in particular is said to have been written out by Glazunov from memory of how Borodin used to play it on the piano. Because Borodin died without settling the order of the scenes, recent productions have begun to rearrange the scenes or restore passages omitted from the Rimsky-Korsakov edition.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Symphony
(Word origin) The Korean word gyohyanggok (交響曲, 'a piece of interweaving resonance') means a piece in which many sounds blend (交) and resound (響) together. The Greek root of the Western name symphony, symphonia, likewise means 'sounding together.' (In music) A large-scale work played by an orchestra, usually made up of four movements of contrasting character: a vigorous first movement, a singing slow movement, a light and quick dance movement, and a brilliant finale. It is like a school sports day, where events of different character, such as sprints, tug-of-war and relays, follow one another until the day is complete.
Scherzo
(Word origin) Scherzo is Italian for 'joke' or 'jest.' (In music) A quick, lively movement within a symphony or string quartet. It is usually in triple time, with a contrasting middle section (the trio) set in before the opening section returns. Like the few minutes of horsing around with friends during a break between heavy classes, it is a place within a large work to catch one's breath and share a laugh. The scherzos of Borodin's First and Second Symphonies are especially famous for their speed.
Nocturne
(Word origin) The Korean word yasanggok (夜想曲, 'night-thought piece') means a piece of thoughts (想) that come at night (夜). The French nocturne and the Italian notturno both likewise come from a word meaning 'of the night.' (In music) A quiet, dreamy, lyrical piece or movement. Chopin's piano nocturnes are the most famous, and Borodin gave this name to the third movement of his String Quartet No. 2. Think of it as music that turns into sound the calm, slightly wistful mood of lying under the covers in a dark room, going back over the day.
Counterpoint
(Word origin) The Korean word daewibeop (對位法, 'method of facing positions') means a method of setting (位) note against (對) note. The Latin root of the English counterpoint, punctus contra punctum, also means 'point against point,' that is, 'note against note.' (In music) The craft of sounding two or more independent melodies at once while making them fit well together. A round is the simplest example: one person starts singing, another joins a little later with the same song, and the two lines overlap in harmony. In In the Steppes of Central Asia, Borodin displayed this craft by sounding an entirely different Russian melody and Eastern melody at the same time.
Orchestration
(Word origin) The Korean word gwanhyeonak (管絃樂, 'pipe-and-string music') means music played together by wind (管) and string (絃) instruments, that is, orchestral music. Gwanhyeonakbeop, 'orchestration,' is the method of putting such music together. (In music) The craft of deciding whether to give a melody to the violins, the flute or the horn, and how to layer the instruments. In English it is called orchestration. Just as the same fried rice tastes different depending on the ingredients and the heat it is cooked over, the same piece takes on an entirely different color depending on how it is divided among the instruments. This was chiefly what Borodin revised after the failed premiere of his Second Symphony. (Elsewhere) In computing, orchestration means automatically coordinating many servers and programs so they run together in the right order.
Pizzicato
(Word origin) Pizzicato comes from the Italian pizzicare, 'to pinch,' and means 'pinched.' (In music) A technique of playing a string instrument such as the violin or cello by plucking the strings with the fingers instead of drawing the bow. It produces short, crisp, detached notes. Think of the sound of a rubber band stretched over the corner of a desk when you flick it. In In the Steppes of Central Asia, the pizzicato of the low strings sounds like the plodding steps of camels and horses.
Romance
(Word origin) Romance originally referred to a song or story composed not in Latin, the language of scholars, but in the local vernacular people spoke every day, that is, a Romance language. (In music) In Russia, a lyrical solo song with piano accompaniment is called a romance. It is the counterpart of the German Lied (art song). Picture singing a textbook art song alone to piano accompaniment in music class. Borodin did not leave many romances, but several, such as The Sleeping Princess, are set to words he wrote himself. (Elsewhere) In everyday usage, romance means a love affair or a love story.