Music: Borodin Centenary

Not since the Bolsheviks took over Russia has there been such a musical orgy as that which began in Leningrad last week, promised to run for ten full days. Soviet Russia was having its first big music festival. Blustery Red music was played in the Tsar’s old palace at Detskoye Selo, in the old Mariinsky Theatre, in the Philharmoniya concert hall and in the famed old opera house. Special excitement came when Violinist Efrem Zimbalist marked his homecoming by soloing in the Glazunov Concerto. But the festival’s high mark was the Opera’s performance of Prince Igor, because the festival was given to commemorate the birthday centenary of Prince Igor’s composer— Alexander Porfirievitch Borodin. Soviets approve Borodin’s music as vigorous, direct, heroic, with a true Russian flavor unblemished by oldtime Russian melancholy. Alexander Porfirievitch was a sane and optimistic artist. As the bastard son of a Prince of Imeretia he never had to worry for his livelihood. His father received a life-long pension after the Empire annexed his little kingdom in 1810. As a boy Alexander Porfirievitch played expertly on the piano, the cello, the flute. But he also showed a talent for medicine which his family regarded as a more respectable profession. He served two years in a military hospital, struggled with chemistry until he became a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Medicine. Chemist Borodin was 28 before he joined the powerful coterie composed of Balakirev, Cui. Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, united in an ideal to restore to Russian music its nationalist essence. Borodin had less time than the others. His home adjoined the medical school. He would work a bit at the piano, then race through the corridors to see how a test tube was behaving. Daytimes he devoted to his medical lectures, to founding and organizing a medical school for women. He called himself a Sunday musician because holidays gave him his only chance for composing. Nights he minded his wife who wheezed through the winters with asthma, dragged him off summers to a shack in the Caucasus where she went barefoot and he had no piano. Borodin called Prince Igor his natural child. Its wild barbaric dances were in his blood. Its Oriental coloring came instinctively to the son of a Georgian chieftain. But Borodin dropped dead at a fancy-dress party, leaving Prince Igor unfinished. His friend Glazunov wrote down the Overture from memory, and most of the orchestration was done by hardworking Rimsky-Korsakov. Music has remembered Borodin longer than Medicine. But on his casket buried near Tchaikovsky’s, Rubinstein’s and Dostoyevsky’s is a silver inscription: “To the Founder, Protector and Defender of the School of Medicine for Women.”