Borodin: String Quartet No. 2 in D major

Of all the composers of the so-called Russian kuchka—the “Mighty Handful,” sometimes known as “The Five”—Alexander Borodin (1833–87) was by far the most attuned to chamber music. In fact he was the only one who composed extensively in the genre, though several of his chamber works remained unfinished or survived incomplete. His two string quartets, however, are substantial and complete, and the second one, composed in 1881, is his last chamber work, apart from a solitary scherzo for string quartet, which ended up in his unfinished Third Symphony.

Introduction

All Borodin’s music has to be understood in the context of the fact that, like his kuchka colleagues, he was a part-time composer with a day job: in his case, a professorship in research chemistry at the Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. For at least the last dozen years of his life he was trying to compose a grand opera on the subject of the 12th-century Russian hero Prince Igor—a work that remained in multiple fragments when he died. The First String Quartet in A major, a long and rather complex score with extensive fugue passages, took him almost five years to complete. The Second Quartet, however, was written quickly—in two or three months during the summer of 1881—and is both shorter and less technical, reflecting the fact that Borodin’s gift was essentially lyrical and tuneful.

History

Borodin had learned the cello as a young man—specifically in order to take part in chamber music—and, when he fell in with the kuchka group (Mily Balakirev, Modest Musorgsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui) in 1862, he had in his locker various (more or less incomplete) chamber works for strings, including a trio, a quintet, and a sextet, as well as a substantial piano quintet, a piano trio, and a cello sonata. But chamber music wasn’t the kuchka’s thing. They wanted to write big, colorful orchestral and operatic works on subjects from Russian history and folklore, and Borodin was soon being pulled in that direction, even though his busy professional life made it hard for him to make headway with works on such a grand scale. When he eventually returned to chamber music in 1874 (with the A-major quartet), he was probably prompted by the example of Rimsky-Korsakov, who, having accepted a professorship at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, had composed a rather self-consciously contrapuntal string quartet: Borodin’s quartet (completed only in 1879) has fugues in three of its four movements. 

The D-major quartet is an altogether more relaxed work, and has always been the more popular of the two. Its beautiful slow movement, “Notturno” (Nocturne), achieved wider fame when its main theme (much expanded) was used as the basis for the song “And This Is My Beloved,” in the musical Kismet (1953). But the level of melodic invention is high throughout the quartet. The work is dedicated to Borodin’s wife Ekaterina, and is said (by his biographer Serge Dianin) to commemorate the couple’s first meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, where Borodin was pursuing his scientific studies, in 1861. The quartet was premiered in St. Petersburg by the Russian Musical Society String Quartet on February 7, 1882.

Borodin: Quartet No. 2 in D major for Strings

Form

The four movements are broadly the conventional ones: a sonata-form first movement (“Allegro moderato” in D major), a scherzo also in sonata form (“Scherzo: Allegro” in F major), a nocturne in A-B-A form (“Notturno: Andante” in A major), and a sonata-form finale (“Finale: Andante,” then “Vivace,” in D major). But the elements of form are fairly easy-going, and the listener is generally more conscious of the character of Borodin’s invention than any great tension in the form. For instance, he marks the end of the first-movement exposition with a sudden quickening, which has the curious effect of separating the themes from their development. The scherzo is eccentrically, yet charmingly, dominated by its second subject: a suave waltz at a slower tempo than the main scherzo theme. Several of the themes are introduced by the cello, either on its own or in duet—a reminder that this was Borodin’s own instrument.

Analysis

Borodin’s approach to quartet-writing is closer to the tradition of Franz Schubert than of Ludwig van Beethoven: the long melodic line is paramount. In the first movement the long-limbed opening theme is played twice through in full, then repeated in dialogue, each time started off by the cello then followed by the first violin. Meanwhile the second violin and viola contribute nothing but chords; and the same is almost true of the second theme, in which they at least get fragments of the melody, but the cello and first violin still lead the way. The contrast with the Classical-era principle of motivic development could hardly be starker. Yet the quality of the ideas, and the skillful balance of the texture, leave no feeling of weakness in the design. 

Again, in the “Notturno,” the cello leads, then in the reprise plays the theme in a close canon with the first violin, which enters only four bars behind the cello. Here, too, the middle instruments only accompany. Borodin takes pity on the second violin, in the middle section, and gives it the delicate countertheme in dialogue with the first violin. But, in general, the process is linear rather than fragmentary. Even in the “Scherzo” there is relatively little distribution of the material: the skittish first theme is played only by the first violin, with an accompanying figure on the second violin, while the viola supports with a waltz-like rhythm that, in fact, then turns into the second theme—slightly slower, in schmaltzy harmonization between the violins.

The finale, after a brief, slow introduction, sets off as if it intends to provide some fugue-style polyphony, but this, too, rapidly subsides into a series of long instrumental lines with ostinato or chordal accompaniment. It’s as if Borodin was studiously avoiding the somewhat self-conscious contrapuntal writing of the first quartet, and instead—like the artist Paul Klee half a century later—decided to take his lines for a walk. The result has marvelous energy and transparency, and the ideas are consistently first-rate.

Critical Thoughts

There is a certain irony in the dedication of this rapidly composed quartet to its composer’s wife. Ekaterina Borodina was much loved by those who knew her (including, of course, her husband), but she had neurotic traits that interfered with his work and were a significant factor, along with his busy professional life, in his failure to complete his great opera Prince Igor. Above all she was an insomniac who came to fear the darkness, refused to go to bed before dawn, and insisted on him staying up with her. Presumably he was only able to write the quartet so quickly because he was on holiday (in the Tula Oblast, south of Moscow) and could compose later in the day after a good sleep.

The work’s lyrical character reflects the fact that Borodin was much preoccupied with vocal music. His next composition after the quartet was probably Prince Igor’s aria in the never-to-be-completed opera. One way or another the opera had been forthcoming since 1869. Some of his most perfect works are songs (“Romances,” as the Russians call them), comparatively little known to Western music-lovers because singers tend to fight shy of the Russian language, and especially the Cyrillic script. But there are also passing connections between the quartet and the little orchestral work Borodin had composed the previous year, In the Steppes of Central Asia, which has a vaguely Eastern turn to its melodies that is echoed in several of the quartet’s themes. 

Legacy

It might seem an insult to Borodin to suggest that his legacy is chiefly to be found in Kismet. But theft is a form of flattery, and much of Kismet is stolen from Borodin. More seriously, Borodin’s music was part of the environment where Igor Stravinsky grew up and composed his ballet The Firebird (1910), in which the influence is audible. A Western admirer of Borodin was Claude Debussy, who had come across the songs while in Russia in the early 1880s (but seems not to have met their composer). Debussy’s String Quartet (1893) also contains echoes of Russian music, including possibly Borodin’s. But Borodin was not so much an innovator as a wild card, a brilliantly gifted composer who had no time to write what might have been epoch-making music.

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Article by Stephen Walsh