St Petersburg полностью

Borodin, the oldest member of Balakirev’s circle, was a physically hearty man almost to his last day. To everyone’s surprise, he died unexpectedly in 1887 in his fifty-fourth year while at a costume ball. Fooling around and making everyone laugh, the composer suddenly leaned against a wall and fell dead to the floor. The diagnosis was a heart attack. He did not finish his major work, Prince Igor, on which he had worked with interruptions for eighteen years. A man of phenomenal musical gifts, Borodin had a multitude of other interests. He was an outstanding chemist and, as head of the chemistry department at the Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy, quickly moved up the ladder, at thirty-three having a civil rank equivalent to general.

Chemistry constantly kept him from composing, as well as from numerous civic functions; in particular, Borodin, a staunch defender of women’s rights, was one of the founders of the first medical courses for women in Russia. His colleagues at the academy found it strange that a talented scientist could be distracted by musical “trifles”; Petersburg suffragettes considered Borodin’s struggle for equal rights for women to be his paramount activity. He himself seemed unable to decide which was the most important: science, civic duties, or composing.

Friends in the Mighty Five, who held Borodin’s musical ability in high regard, were dismayed by his disregard of composition. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled bitterly his attempts to urge Borodin to work more diligently on Prince Igor:

Sometimes you’d go see him and ask what he had done. And he’d show you a page or two of score or maybe nothing at all. You’d ask, “Alexander Porfiryevich, have you written?” And he’d reply, “I have.” It would turn out he’s written a lot of letters. “Alexander Porfiryevich, have you at least arranged such-and-such a number?” “I have,” he would reply seriously. “Thank God, at last!” “I arranged it to be moved from the piano to the table,” he would continue just as seriously and calmly.66

After Borodin’s untimely death Rimsky-Korsakov and his younger friend, Alexander Glazunov, completed and orchestrated Prince Igor. One of the main reasons for this noble deed was the cult of continuity that reigned in Petersburg, as well as the desire for a certain kind of art school, or at least a revolutionary circle like Balakirev’s that functioned as a school, to remain intact.

In a city that seemed almost perfect in its architectural orderliness and completeness, the very idea of completeness was in the air, influencing creative people; every work, it seemed, had to be finished. This impulsive longing for order clearly affected Rimsky-Korsakov, the most Petersburgian in character and aesthetics of the Mighty Five. As the most professional of the group, Rimsky-Korsakov not only completed (with Cui) Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest, completed and orchestrated Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, edited and reorchestrated his Boris Godunov, and prepared his Marriage for publication, but edited (with friends) Glinka’s opera scores.

Dedicated to Glinka, Borodin’s Prince Igor continued the patriotic line of A Life for the Tsar. The plot of the opera, based on a Slavic epic text of the twelfth century, is suitably simple. The Russian Prince Igor goes on a campaign against the hostile Asiatic tribe of Polovtsians, is taken prisoner, and escapes. This spare story was developed by Borodin in such a way as to make his work the most imperial opera in the history of Russian music.

Two contrasting worlds are depicted in Prince Igor—the Russian and the Polovtsian. Naturally, Borodin’s sympathies are with the Russians, even though the composer was the illegitimate son of a Georgian (Imeretin) prince. Prince Igor is the ideal hero, first among equals, and he is supported by the boyars, the troops, and the people. He is the personification of Russian statehood as Borodin saw it: strong, just, civilizing. On the other hand, the nomadic barbarian Polovtsians, for whom the idea of the state is alien, live in a world of violence and destruction.