Borodin: Scherzo, from Les Vendredis (publ. 1899), Vol.2 No.12
Until the magnificent cycle of fifteen quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich, Russia had always lacked a strong chamber music tradition; her greatest nineteenth century quartets were undoubtedly by Borodin and Tchaikovsky – a grand total of five and a quarter – but those of the former were disapproved of by his nationalist colleagues in Moguchaya Kuchka (“The Five”), while Pyotr Ilyich listed chamber compositions with strings among his most hated instrumental combinations. Nevertheless, an amateur enthusiasm proliferated, no more typified than by the Friday quartet meetings at the home of the wealthy timber merchant/publisher/impresario/amateur viola player Mitrofan Belaiev. Music by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven was the usual fare, but the gatherings also provided a platform for new works by contemporary Russian composers. Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, as friends of Belaiev himself, were the original contacts, such that their own pupils and colleagues gradually gained access to this exclusive circle. A number of collaborative projects arose from the evenings, one of them being a quartet based on the musical letters of their host’s name (B-La-F), but perhaps the most celebrated was the two volumes of various short pieces by ten different composers, appropriately entitled Les Vendredis. Amongst the familiar names of Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Borodin can be found such virtually unknown characters as Felix Blumenfeld, Nikolai Artsybushchev, Maximilian D’Osten-Sacken, and Joseph Wihtol, as well as the brilliant but rather lazy Liadov.
The Borodin Scherzo is better known as the second of the two surviving movements of his Symphony No.3 – left unfinished at his sudden death, along with his magnificent opera Prince Igor, both of which were completed by Alexander Glazunov, assisted by his prodigious memory; he claimed Borodin himself had played much of this music to him – which he never got round to writing down. It is all too easy for the musician to bemoan the fact that he spent more of his time as a chemistry professor than as a composer. A statue erected to him in Russia actually pays tribute to his services to science rather than to music – and it should not be forgotten that in 1872 he had founded the first medical courses for women in the country. Borodin himself complained of the “difficulty of being at one and the same time both a Glinka and a Stupishin [a civil servant], scientist, commissioner, artist, government official, philanthropist, father of other people’s children, doctor, and invalid…You end up by becoming only the last”.
© Alan George
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