Nocturne

The Nocturne is the third movement of Borodin's Second String Quartet, written in 1881 and offered to his wife Ekaterina as a memento of the summer twenty years earlier when they had met in Heidelberg. The cello carries the melody first, the first violin answers it, and the two trade the line in canon. Its popularity outgrew the quartet: string orchestra arrangements followed, Malcolm Sargent's among the best known, and in 1953 the theme was fitted with words as This Is My Beloved for the Broadway musical Kismet.