Borodin: String Quartets Nos. 1 And 2

Description

Alexander Porfir'yevich Borodin (1833 - 1887) String Quartet No.1 in A MajorString Quartet No.2 in D MajorThe second half of the nineteenth century brought with it a burgeoning of Russian culture, itself, whatever nationalist critics might have said, a result of that cross-fertilisation of ideas that has its origin in the reforms of Peter the Great. In music nationalism was represented by the Five, described by the polymath Stasov as the Mighty Handful, led by Balakirev, with Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin. Except for the first, their self-appointed leader, the others were essentially amateur, at least in their musical origins. There was, after all, some justice in the criticism of amateurism levelled at them by Anton Rubinstein, founder of the first professional Russian music conservatory in St. Petersburg. Cui held a position as a professor of military fortification; Mussorgsky was at first an army officer and later a civil servant; Rimsky-Korsakov started his career as a naval officer; Borodin was a distinguished analytical chemist. The illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, Borodin was given the name of one of his father's serfs. Prince Gedianov, anxious to secure the future of his mistress, found a husband for her, an elderly retired army doctor, outlived by Gedianov, who died in 1843. Borodin's mother was left well enough off to allow her son an education, training as a doctor, followed by a successful profession as a chemist. Music was always a strong interest, but in a busy life there was not always the time needed t0 accomplish the musical ambitions that Borodin entertained, so that at the lime of his death in 1887 he had not finished his opera Prince Igor, a work finally shaped by Rimsky-Korsakov and the young Glazunov. Borodin's musical interests were stimulated by his meeting in 1859 with Mussorgsky, who had resigned his commission in order to devote more of his lime to music and still further by a period spent in Germany and other countries in Western Europe, where he had opportunity to enjoy wider musical experience. It was in Heidelberg in 1861 that he met his future wife, a gifted pianist. On his return in 1862 to St. Petersburg, where he assumed his expected position at the Academy of Physicians, lecturing in organic chemistry, he met Balakirev, who exercised a strong influence on him and convinced him of his musical vocation and of the form it should take as a fellow-disciple of Glinka. It seems that Borodin had started work on his String Quartet in A major by the summer of 1874, while he was working on Prince Igor. Sketches of the quartet were shown to Stasov and Mussorgsky in April the following year, much to their dismay at this use of a form that they chose to regard as obsolete. By the summer of 1877 he was still working on the quartet, during a brief holiday in the country and two years later, again at Davydovo, he was once more busy completing the same work, and working further on his opera. The quartet was