Читать книгу The Collins Guide To Opera And Operetta - Michael White - Страница 36
Оглавление(1833–87)
Prince Igor (1869–87)
The illegitimate son of a Russian prince, Alexander Borodin was one of the group of composers known as ‘The Mighty Handful’ or ‘The Five’ who were largely self-taught and combined their creative work with other careers. Borodin, who described music as ‘a pastime, a relaxation from more serious pursuits’, was an academic chemist; which explains why his one surviving opera, Prince Igor, remained incomplete at his death, despite seventeen years of intermittent work on the score. It was subsequently completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. Apart from Prince Igor, Borodin’s best-known compositions are his symphonies (two complete, one unfinished) and string quartets, whose tunes were ambushed and recycled into the 1950s musical Kismet.
