Alexander Borodin

Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin was born in Saint Petersburg on October 31, 1833, the illegitimate son of a Georgian nobleman, Prince Luka Gedevanishvili, and Avdotya Antonova, a Russian woman of modest background. Following a common practice of the time, the boy was registered as the legal son of one of the prince's serfs, a man named Porfiry Borodin, whose surname he carried for the rest of his life ^[1].

Despite the irregular circumstances of his birth, Borodin grew up in comfort. His mother saw to a broad private education that included German, French, and English, and the child showed early gifts in two directions at once. He began piano lessons, taught himself the flute and cello, and wrote small compositions while still a boy. At the same time he filled the family apartment with homemade chemical experiments, an enthusiasm his household tolerated with some alarm ^[2].

In 1850 he entered the Medico-Surgical Academy in Saint Petersburg, the institution that would anchor his entire working life. There he studied under the chemist Nikolai Zinin, one of the leading Russian scientists of the era, who became his mentor and, reportedly, despaired of his student's habit of spending time on music ^[1].

Borodin graduated from the academy in 1856 and completed a doctorate in chemistry in 1858, with a dissertation on the analogy between arsenic and phosphoric acids. A year in a military hospital convinced him that clinical medicine was not his calling, and he turned fully toward laboratory research ^[2].

Between 1859 and 1862 he traveled in Western Europe on a scientific fellowship, working in Heidelberg alongside a remarkable cohort of young Russian chemists that included Dmitri Mendeleev. The journey shaped him in another way as well: in Heidelberg he met Ekaterina Protopopova, a gifted Russian pianist recuperating abroad, who introduced him to the music of Schumann and Chopin and later became his wife ^[3].

Back in Saint Petersburg in 1862, Borodin was appointed adjunct professor of chemistry at the Medico-Surgical Academy, succeeding to Zinin's chair in 1864. That same autumn of 1862 brought the second decisive meeting of his life. The composer Mily Balakirev took him on as a private student and drew him into the circle of nationalist composers later nicknamed The Five or the Mighty Handful, alongside Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Cui. Under Balakirev's prodding, Borodin began his First Symphony, finishing it in 1867; its successful premiere in 1869 announced a major new Russian voice ^[1].

Any account of Alexander Borodin achievements has to run on two parallel tracks. In chemistry, he published research on aldehydes that made his name in European science. In 1862 he described a method for preparing organobromine compounds by treating silver carboxylates with bromine, a transformation now known as the Hunsdiecker reaction and sometimes called the Borodin reaction in recognition of his priority ^[4]. In 1872 he reported one of the earliest observations of the aldol reaction, working independently of Charles-Adolphe Wurtz in Paris, and the two are jointly credited with its discovery ^[4].

In music, his catalogue is small but unusually durable. The Second Symphony in B minor, completed in 1876, is often described as one of the defining works of Russian musical nationalism, driven by blunt, heroic themes that contemporaries associated with the world of the old Russian epics ^[5]. The orchestral sketch In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880), written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of Alexander II, pictures a caravan crossing the plain under Russian escort and quickly became his most performed piece abroad ^[1].

His largest project was the opera Prince Igor, based on the medieval epic The Lay of Igor's Host, which he worked at intermittently for some eighteen years without finishing. Its most famous excerpt, the Polovtsian Dances, entered the concert repertoire during his lifetime. After his death, Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov completed and orchestrated the opera from his manuscripts, and it reached the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in 1890 ^[5]. His two string quartets, particularly the Second in D major with its much loved Nocturne, secured his standing in chamber music as well ^[1].

Borodin always described himself as a chemist who composed on Sundays, holidays, and during illnesses. He held his professorship at the Medico-Surgical Academy for more than two decades, lecturing, supervising students, and running laboratories, and colleagues in science knew little of his musical standing ^[2].

He was also a practical reformer. In 1872 he helped establish medical courses for women in Saint Petersburg, among the first opportunities for women in the Russian Empire to receive formal medical training, and he taught and defended the program until near the end of his life ^[3]. Students remembered him as generous with his time to the point of self-neglect, his apartment at the academy constantly filled with relatives, lodgers, and visitors seeking help.

This crowded existence explains the slow pace of his composing. Works stalled for years while academic duties, committee work, and his wife's chronic asthma consumed his attention. Rimsky-Korsakov later recalled with frustration how often he found his friend absorbed in laboratory matters when an act of Prince Igor sat unfinished on the piano ^[5].

Borodin married Ekaterina Protopopova in 1863, after their meeting in Heidelberg. The marriage was affectionate but strained by circumstance: Ekaterina's asthma made the damp Saint Petersburg climate dangerous for her, and she spent long stretches in Moscow with her mother, leaving the composer to manage the household alone ^[3].

The couple had no biological children, but they raised several adopted daughters, and their home functioned as an open refuge for an extended circle of dependents. Accounts from friends describe irregular meals, cats walking across the dinner table, and a man who might answer the door mid-thought about either a fugue or a distillation ^[2].

He was, by the standards of his circle, unusually free of vanity. He shrugged off criticism, rarely pushed for performances of his own works, and left much of his music in disordered manuscript. That indifference to self-promotion, combined with the demands of his scientific post, kept his completed output to roughly two dozen significant works ^[1].

Recognition beyond Russia arrived in Borodin's final decade, helped considerably by Franz Liszt, whom he visited in Weimar in 1877. Liszt admired the symphonies, encouraged their performance in Germany, and accepted the dedication of In the Steppes of Central Asia. Performances in Belgium in 1885 and 1886, championed by the countess de Mercy-Argenteau, made Borodin something of a celebrity in Brussels and Liège ^[5].

At home, the 1880s were harder. The deaths of Zinin in 1880 and Mussorgsky in 1881 shook him, his wife's health declined further, and pressure on the women's medical courses from a reactionary government added administrative battles to his load. His own health deteriorated, with episodes of chest pain and cholera in 1885 leaving him visibly weakened ^[3].

On February 15, 1887, Borodin attended a costume ball for the faculty of the academy, dressed in Russian national costume and by all accounts in high spirits. In the middle of the festivities he collapsed and died within moments of a burst artery in the heart, at the age of fifty-three. He was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg, near Mussorgsky and later Tchaikovsky ^[1].

Borodin left Prince Igor, a Third Symphony, and other works incomplete, and his legacy owes much to the devotion of friends. Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov spent years editing, completing, and orchestrating his manuscripts, decisions that scholars still debate but that put the music before the public ^[5].

The afterlife of that music has been unusually broad. In 1953 the Broadway musical Kismet set new lyrics to Borodin's melodies, and the song Stranger in Paradise, drawn from the Polovtsian Dances, carried his themes to audiences who had never heard his name; the adaptation earned him a posthumous Tony Award credit in 1954 ^[6]. The Second String Quartet's Nocturne remains a staple of recordings and film scores.

Chemistry remembers him too. The aldol reaction he co-discovered sits in every organic chemistry course, and historians of science regularly cite him as the outstanding example of dual achievement in art and research ^[4]. Among Alexander Borodin facts, perhaps the most telling is that either half of his life's work, the laboratory or the opera house, would alone have earned him a lasting reputation. A crater on Mercury and an asteroid carry his name, and any serious Alexander Borodin biography must reckon with a man who treated genius as a part-time occupation and still ranks among the great Russian composers ^[1].