Alexander Borodin

Chemistry was the profession; music was what he did with the time that was left. Borodin trained at the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy in Saint Petersburg, published original research on aldehydes, held a professorship there, and worked to open medical education to women. Composition was the occupation of Sundays and holidays, and he was candid about it. Balakirev drew him into the circle that became the Five. His completed works include two symphonies, the orchestral sketch In the Steppes of Central Asia, two string quartets, and a handful of songs. Prince Igor occupied him for eighteen years and was still unfinished when he died in 1887; Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov assembled the performing version. He was born in Saint Petersburg in 1833, the illegitimate son of the Georgian prince Luka Gedevanishvili, and was registered as the child of a serf named Porfiry Borodin, whose surname he kept. He entered the academy in 1850, served a year as a surgeon in a military hospital and spent three more studying in western Europe; the school of medicine for women he founded in the capital kept him teaching until 1885. He took composition lessons from Balakirev after meeting him in 1862, and the First Symphony was first heard in 1869 under Balakirev, the year he began both the Second and Prince Igor.