For Borodin the ethical superiority of Russians over Asiatics was obvious. But the composer’s Caucasian roots gave him a subtle, intuitive understanding of Oriental musical material. This penchant for working with non-European motifs was earlier realized brilliantly by Borodin when he took part with other Russian composers in writing music for the tableaux vivants for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alexander II’s reign. Borodin’s In Central Asia was the most successful and durable of the works composed for that official occasion. The symphonic picture with a vividness reminiscent of Vereshchagin’s genre paintings from central Asia beautifully and eloquently re-created the atmosphere of Turkestan—languid but filled with a sense of hidden danger. Explaining his music, Borodin wrote in the program, “Through a vast desert comes a foreign caravan, guarded by Russian troops.” In fact, In Central Asia is written from the point of view of the Russian soldier patrolling a vanquished Asian province; Borodin wholly identified with what he called the “Russian fighting might.”
In contrast to In Central Asia, the music of the Polovtsians in Prince Igor is much more dynamic and imbued with a sensual joy approaching ecstasy. It is also militant and threatening. Borodin is clearly at home emotionally in the Polovtsian camp. He is not just an observer but practically a participant in the frenzied orgy. This is one of the obvious reasons why audiences all over the world are enchanted by the Polovtsian dances. The mind may resist their hypnotism, but they still work on the subconscious. And the impact of the music is even greater when performed out of context, as a separate symphonic or ballet number, thus severing the logical and intellectual bonds provided by the patriotic libretto.
Nevertheless, taken as a whole, Prince Igor is undoubtedly proclaiming the triumph of reason over emotion, and loyalty to a strong sovereign over the free-for-all of anarchy. Still, in 1888 the wary Alexander III, prejudiced against the aesthetically rebellious Mighty Five, had to be persuaded of the opera’s propagandistic values.
Mitrofon Belyaev, the lumber millionaire and Petersburg patron of the arts, took on the difficult task. Following the prescribed Byzantine court procedures, he petitioned Alexander III to allow him to present the tsar with the printed score of Prince Igor, published at Belyaev’s expense. If the sovereign accepted such a present, that would signal the rehabilitation of Prince Igor; the question mark hanging over the production would thus disappear. In the accompanying explanatory note the millionaire patron of the arts duly stressed the patriotic and loyal content of Borodin’s opera. After some thought, Alexander III accepted the present, and the opera was restored in the repertory plans of the imperial theater.
The production of Prince Igor was opulent and extremely realistic; in particular, the costume and set designers studied Vereshchagin’s central Asian paintings. The Polovtsian scenes required over two hundred people onstage. At the premiere the famous bass of the imperial stage, Fyodor Stravinsky, the father of the composer, Igor, stood out. From the opera’s first performance on October 23, 1890, it was a hit with the Petersburg audience; according to contemporary accounts, the public “roared” in a surge of patriotic fervor.
Prince Igor had a profound effect on twenty-year-old Alexander Benois. Calling Borodin “a dilettante prophet of genius,” Benois recalled later how the music of Prince Igor helped him cross the emotional bridge from the legendary world of ancient Russia and its “proud and noble rulers” to modern, imperial Petersburg. “Through it, Russian antiquity became close and familiar to me, a hardbitten Westernizer; this music beckoned me with its freshness, something primordial and healthy—the very things that touched me in Russian nature, in Russian speech, and in the very essence of Russian thought.”67
The contagious patriotism of Prince Igor united such polar opposites as Sergei Diaghilev, the young aesthete and snob who never missed a performance of the new opera, and Alexei Suvorin, the conservative nationalist publisher of Novoe vremya (New Times), the largest newspaper in Petersburg. Suvorin, who never interfered with the music department of his quite glib publication, broke this rule to announce in print that the modern autocratic Russia is the continuation and apotheosis of the opera’s central idea of the unity of people and ruler.
