- by Art Sulit, www.MuSeeks.com/ArthurSulit
Music Timeline Author
Alexander Borodin, a chemist, was one of the 'St. Petersburg Five' (next to Mussourgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, & Balakirev) who were all amateur or part-time composers. Mussorgsky was a government Postal employee. Rimsky-Korsakov was a Naval Officer.
The 'St. Petersburg Five', like Musketteers, stood for fierce Independence from convention, of which Tchaikovsky and Anton Rubenstein (Tchaikovsky's teacher) at the Moscow Conservatory were much-disdained arch-rivals. The "Five" were Russian Nationalists in their sense for freedom from Germanic/European musical influence. Whereas Tchaikovsky was an astute and willing student of German musical style (in instrumentation, form & structure), the "Five" deliberately shunned these studies in a vain ideal to remain purely "Russian". Mussorgsky most of all expressed the deepest contempt for the German influence. Rimsky-Korsakov, however, later "defected", seeing the infinite wisdom of studying the German art (Mozart, Haydn, Bach etc.)--and so he took private lessons under Tchaikovsky whenever opportune. He went on later to write the landmark 'Principles of Orchestration', outlining the many German ideas of balance which Tchaikovsky himself used profusely.
"German", "Russian" or not, both camps can be said to have derived their unique "Russian-ness" from their great Russian predecessor, Mikhail Glinka (from the early 1800's). In listening to Glinka's works, you can hear the very "Russian" character which flows like a thread throughout Borodin's, Mussorgsky's, and Tchaikovsky's works. This "Russian" psyche often has a depressive (but not manic) air to it, charachterized by often-descending note motifs or scales, expressing both joy and anguish from the harsh political, religious and weather climate which is still a part of Russia today.
In Borodin arises some of the most beautiful, lyrical melodies ever written. His Polovetsian Dances are standards heard in so many popular "Love Songs" CD compilations, and in the classic MGM movie musical, 'Kismet'. Due to his 'St. Petersburg' stance, however, he fell far short of nurturing the highly refined Germanic capability to develop his themes to the complex and infinitely more intiguing levels of Brahms of Tchaikovsky. Not to mention the fact that he lacked a patron (like Tchaikovsky's Nadezdah von Meck), and so he was unable to focus on refining his composing full-time. Often he would take decades to finish a work (like his opera 'Prince Igor'), heroically placing his day job and large family first before music. But still, for a man who had to eck out a living himself outside of music, and to our ears today, his haunting, exquisite melodies are plenty fair enough.