Alexandre Borodine

Alexander Borodin was born in St Petersburg on 12 November 1833. He was the illegitimate son of an elderly Georgian prince, Luka Gedevanishvili, and a young woman, Avdotya Antonova. As was customary, he was registered as the son of one of the prince’s serfs, Porfiry Borodin, whose name he took. His father freed him and provided for his education. Brought up by his mother in comfort, he received an excellent education and was passionate from an early age about both music and chemistry: as a child he turned his bedroom into a laboratory.

He learned flute, piano and cello and composed a polka at nine. But he chose a scientific career: in 1850 he entered the Medical-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg, where he received a doctorate in chemistry in 1858. He nonetheless continued to play chamber music with friends. From 1859 to 1862 he pursued research in Germany, at Heidelberg, and in Italy, mixing with the greatest chemists of the day, such as Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table.

In Heidelberg he met Ekaterina Protopopova, a highly talented young pianist from Moscow, who introduced him to Chopin and Schumann. They married in 1863. Back in St Petersburg in 1862, Borodin met the composer Mily Balakirev, who persuaded him to take composition seriously. He thus joined “The Five”, a circle of Russian composers — Balakirev, César Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and himself — who sought to create an authentically Russian music inspired by folklore and national history.

In 1864 he became professor of chemistry at the Medical Academy, where he pursued a brilliant scientific career all his life. He discovered several chemical reactions, one of which bears his name, the Borodin (or Hunsdiecker) reaction, and took part in discoveries about aldehydes. He also devoted himself to his students and to the cause of women: in 1872 he helped found the first medical courses for women in Russia, where he taught.

Music remained a pastime for him, practised in his rare free moments or when he was ill. He called himself a “Sunday composer”. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled that when he visited, he often found him moving between the laboratory and the piano. This explains why his output is small and why several of his compositions remained unfinished. Yet he completed two symphonies, including the powerful, epic Second (1876), and two string quartets.

His String Quartet No. 2 (1881), dedicated to his wife for the twentieth anniversary of their meeting, contains a famous Nocturne, one of the most beautiful melodies in the repertoire. In 1880 he wrote In the Steppes of Central Asia, a symphonic picture evoking a caravan crossing the desert escorted by Russian soldiers. For nearly eighteen years he worked on his grand opera Prince Igor, after a medieval Russian epic, telling of Prince Igor’s struggle against the Polovtsians, a nomadic people. The famous Polovtsian Dances come from it.

On 27 February 1887, at a costume ball held at the Academy, Borodin, dressed in traditional Russian costume, collapsed mid-conversation from a heart attack. He was fifty-three. His friends Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov completed Prince Igor, premiered in 1890 in St Petersburg; Glazunov even reconstructed from memory the overture he had heard Borodin play on the piano. In 1953 his melodies were used in the Broadway musical Kismet.