Aleksandr Borodin

Russian composer

• Born: November 12, 1833
• Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
• Died: February 27, 1887
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

A remarkable creative artist, a respected scientist, and a person of exceptional sensibility and refinement, Borodin made a significant contribution to the repertory of Russian national music, with particular excellence in the domains of opera, symphonic music, chamber music, and song.

Early Life

Aleksandr Porfiryevich Borodin (BORH-ah-deen) was born out of wedlock to Prince Luka Stepanovitch Gedianov and Avdotya Konstantinova Antinova. Following Aleksandr’s birth, his father had him registered as the legal son of Porfiry Borodin, one of his servants, in accordance with a custom of the time and arranged for his mistress to marry Christian Ivanovitch Kleinecke, a retired army medical practitioner. Aleksandr was educated by private tutors, with emphasis placed on foreign languages (German, French, and English). Prior to his death, Luka granted freedom to his son. Avdotya, after her husband’s death, bore another son, Dmitry, through another liaison, and bought a house near the Semyonov Parade Ground, which is where Aleksandr spent his youth and adolescence.

Borodin composed a Polka in D Minor that he entitled “Hélène.” Piano study, attendance at symphonic concerts at the university during the winter and at Joseph Gungl’s concerts at Pavlovsk in the summer, and self-instruction on the cello moved the youth toward serious creativity; indeed, in 1847, he composed a Trio in G Major on a theme from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, and a concert for flute and piano. There followed, in quick succession, two piano compositions, a fantasy on a theme by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and a study, Le Courant . While developing his emerging musical talent, Borodin evinced an equally strong interest in chemistry.

In the fall of 1850, Borodin was an external student at the Academy of Physicians. By 1855, he completed his course of study with distinction. Borodin moved up the ladder of academic success with alacrity. He gained experience as a surgeon but came to realize that he was ill-suited for this calling. On May 5, 1858, he was awarded the doctor of medicine degree. After travels to western Europe connected with his scientific career, he corresponded in the fall of 1859 with Modest Mussorgsky, from whom he acquired an appreciation for the music of Robert Schumann. Later that year, his teacher Nikolai Zinin arranged for Borodin to work in Heidelberg so as to gain the kind of experience that would enable him to assume a professorial position in chemistry upon his return.

Life’s Work

The Heidelberg period, which extended to 1862, proved to be a turning point in Borodin’s life. It was here that he developed a friendship with the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev and attended lectures by such luminaries as Hermann Helmholtz and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, the latter a pioneer with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen in the field of spectrum analysis. Travel to Freiburg (where he heard the famed organ there), Italy, and the Netherlands turned the once-sheltered Borodin into a cosmopolite.

In May, 1861, Borodin met his future wife, the twenty-nine-year-old Ekaterina Sergeyevna Protopopova. He traveled with her to Mannheim to hear such Wagnerian epics as Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1848), and settled with her in Pisa. In terms of composition, he produced in this period a Sonata in C Minor for cello and piano (a three-movement work based on the fugue theme from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata in G Minor for violin), a Scherzo in E Major for piano duet, several incomplete chamber works, and, most significantly, a Sextet in D Minor for strings.

This last composition was written, according to its creator, to please the Germans. Its two movements reflect Mendelssohnian traits, as, for example, in the lively sonata-allegro first movement with its “feminine” second subject and in the theme and variation second movement based on the song “How Did I Grieve Thee?” employed previously by Borodin. Particularly interesting is the pizzicato variation, a technique that came to be identified with the Russian as it had been with Felix Mendelssohn.

The four-movement Quintet in F Minor for strings establishes Borodin as a master of the early Romantic style associated with the German school, notably in the use of classical forms, lyrical and evocative melodic lines, excellence in part-writing, and elfinlike scherzo movements. In addition, there is present a nostalgic yearning for the homeland, an awareness of the contributions of Mikhail Glinka in particular, and a Russian imprint on the Germanic fabric.

Borodin returned to St. Petersburg in September, 1862, and by December he was actively engaged in the world of academia. Apart from lecturing and translating scientific books, he gravitated again toward musical creativity, especially after meeting Mily Alekseyevich Balakirev, mentor of the so-called Russian Five. After hearing the incipient works by this quintet of nationalists, the groundwork was laid for a shift from mainstream German Romanticism to Russian nationalism. Despite a fitful approach to large-scale composition, necessitated by his vocation, Borodin, under Balakirev’s guidance, produced his First Symphony in 1867; it was premiered under Balakirev’s direction on March 7, 1868, before the Russian Musical Society’s directorate and, on January 16, 1869, it received its first public hearing.

Encouraged by Balakirev, Borodin acquired the confidence to pursue his creative avocation on a surer footing. Although the opera-farce Bogatiri was a dismal failure at its premiere on November 18, 1867, the songs, which include “Pesnya tyomnovo lesa” (song of the dark forest) and “Falshivaya nota” (the false note) were more successful.

Borodin’s personal life was solidified with his marriage to Ekaterina on April 17, 1863, in St. Petersburg. That fall, the couple moved to an apartment in a building owned by the Academy of Military Medicine, and, except for occasional travel, it was Borodin’s abode until his death. Throughout his life, Borodin was found attractive by adoring young women; however, with the adoption of seven-year-old Liza Bolaneva, his marriage was established on solid footing.

In April, 1869, the critic Vladimir Stasov suggested that Borodin begin the opera that would be named Prince Igor , which was based on a twelfth century epic. By March, 1870, however, when his original interest in the project waned, he adopted some of the music he had already committed to paper for use in his Symphony No. 2 in B Minor. During the early 1870’s, professional responsibilities created continuing impediments to uninterrupted musical achievement.

In addition to lecturing on chemistry and supervising student work, Borodin became a leading advocate for medical courses for women. During 1874-1875, the “Polovtsian Dances” and other segments of Prince Igor were completed, and between 1874 and 1879 he finished the String Quartet in A Major. On March 10, 1877, Eduard Napravnik conducted the completed Second Symphony with limited success. After some revision, the work was accorded a more favorable response when it was conducted on March 4, 1879, by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov . The four-movement work is notable for its coloristic treatment of the orchestra, particularly for the passages for winds and harp, for its rhythmic drive and meter changes, and for its juxtaposition of long-breathed, folkloric melody and exciting, Tartarlike abandon.

Having achieved the succor that comes after so arduous an experience as seeing his Second Symphony through to a public performance, Borodin visited various German universities with a view toward gaining a better understanding of their laboratories. On one such trip, he called on Franz Liszt at Weimar (July, 1877) and met with the Hungarian master on five different occasions over a three-week period. A few more numbers were added to Prince Igor, but a streak of procrastination prevented the opera from moving forward to completion; it was left to Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Glazunov to orchestrate much of it after Borodin’s death.

Ironically, Borodin squandered much of the little time he had dallying with musical jokes, such as a polka contrived to be performed with “Chopsticks” as the accompaniment. While other composers contributed their talents to compositions on this motif, among them Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatoly Lyadov, and saw the entire set published in 1880 under the title Paraphrases, Balakirev rebuked the perpetrators of this farce for wasting time and effort on such trifles. Meanwhile, through Liszt’s influence, Borodin’s music obtained a hearing in western Europe. The Symphony No. 1 was performed in Baden-Baden, Germany, on May 20, 1880, the year in which Borodin wrote his symphonic poem, In the Steppes of Central Asia (dedicated to Liszt).

A setting of Alexander Pushkin’s poem “Dlya beregov otchizni dalnoy” (for the shores of thy far native land) was prompted by the death from alcoholism of Mussorgsky on March 28, 1881. The String Quartet No. 2 in D Major, dedicated to Borodin’s wife, suggests an evocation of the idyllic period in Heidelberg. It is best known today for its third movement, the Nocturne, in which the cello is given a soaring melodic line of incomparable beauty. Although Ekaterina’s health was always precarious, it was Borodin who suffered an attack of cholera in June, 1885, leading, eventually, to the heart disease that took his life.

The European taste for Borodin’s music spread to France and Belgium, and, in appreciation of her efforts on his behalf, Borodin dedicated to the Belgian Countess of Mercy-Argenteau his six-movement Petite Suite for piano (1885). With César Cui, he enjoyed huge successes in Liège and Brussels. In 1886, despite the illnesses of his wife and mother-in-law, Borodin collaborated with Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, and Glazunov on a string quartet in honor of the publisher M. P. Balaiev. Two movements of his Third Symphony were completed, the second of which is a scherzo whose material is drawn from Prince Igor. Although interest in the opera was revived in 1887, only an overture and several additional numbers were actually completed. On the evening of February 27, 1887, at a lavish ball for the families and friends of the faculty of the Medical Academy, Borodin, attired in red shirt and high boots, and in apparent good spirits, succumbed suddenly to heart failure and died instantly. His beloved Ekaterina survived him by five months.

Significance

Of Aleksandr Borodin, Sir William Hadow said: “No musician has ever claimed immortality with so slender an offering. Yet, if there be, indeed, immortalities in music, his claim is incontestable.” It is assuredly a phenomenal achievement when an individual rises to a position of eminence in fields as diverse as music and science, the one so intuitive and subjective but requiring the utmost discipline, the other so measured and objective. Borodin was somehow able to bring his analytical mind to bear on his creative impulses.

Borodin was a remarkable creative artist, a respected scientist, and a human being of the utmost sensibility and refinement. That he found the time and the inclination to cofound the School of Medicine for Women in St. Petersburg and to teach chemistry there from 1872 until his death bespeaks a man well ahead of his time. Borodin’s compassion for humankind, his life of industry, and his zeal in the pursuit of excellence serve as reminders to a skeptical world that a job worth doing is a job worth doing well. When his music was adapted for use in the box-office triumph Kismet, which opened at New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre on December 3, 1953, American audiences were introduced to Borodin’s art in popularized format, and they were touched. Since that time, these treasures, in the original versions and touchups, have earned an honored place in the concert halls of the world. Borodin’s is a music that contains a civility that transcends national boundaries.

Bibliography

Abraham, Gerald. Borodin: The Composer and His Music. London: William Reeves, 1927. A very thorough traversal of Borodin’s life and works. Contains musical analyses.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. On Russian Music. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Two of the book’s chapters deal expressly with Borodin and his music. One is devoted to “The History of Prince Igor,” while the other deals with “Borodin’s Songs.”

Abraham, Gerald, and David Lloyd-Jones. “Alexander Borodin.” In The New Grove Russian Masters, edited by David Brown, et al. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1986. An outstanding encyclopedia entry covering the salient biographical data and providing a clear-cut overview of Borodin’s music according to genre. Contains a catalog of works and a fine bibliography.

Asafiev, B. V. Russian Music from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Alfred J. Swan. Ann Arbor, Mich.: J. W. Edwards for the American Council of Learned Societies, 1953. This influential work treats Borodin’s music in the context of broad categories of subject matter. The approach allows the reader to see the composer’s contributions via-à-vis those of his principal contemporaries and in the light of the aesthetic trends then prevalent in Russia.

Calvocoressi, Michel D., and Gerald Abraham. Masters of Russian Music. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936. Presents a fine traversal of the major events in the composer’s life and touches on the high points of representative compositions.

Dianin, Sergei. Borodin. Translated by Robert Lord. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. This is a major life and works study of Borodin, with very important coverage of his ancestry, his childhood, and his adolescence. The music is discussed according to genre. Includes a chronological catalog of works and a genealogical table. A first-rate piece of scholarship.

Habets, Alfred. Borodin and Liszt. Translated by Rosa Newmarch. London: Digby, Long, 1895. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1977. Part 1 covers Borodin’s life and works, touching on significant biographical details. A chapter entitled “The Scientist” presents insight into this major aspect of the artist’s dual allegiances.

Lloyd-Jones, David. “Borodin in Heidelberg.” Musical Quarterly 46 (1960): 500. A thorough account of Borodin’s stay in Heidelberg. Emphasizes his development as a composer, offers succinct comments and insights into specific compositions, and places the musical contributions in the context of his personal life and his scientific career.

Maes, Francis. A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. A discussion of Borodin’s music is included in this overview of Russian music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Maes rejects the traditional belief that nineteenth century Russian nationalism and interest in folklore was synonymous with political and social progressivism.