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Borodin's 'Prince Igor, and 'Die Mainacht' by Rimsky-Korsakov, are thought highly of by the fellow-countrymen of the composers, but neither work has succeeded in crossing the frontier of Russia.
If there is any symphony that can be called pre-eminently virile and Russian, it is assuredly Borodin's second, the great one in B-minor. And in "Prince Igor" and the symphonic poem "On the Steppes," for the first time, continental Asia, with its sharp beat of savage drums and its oceanic wastes of grass, its strong Kurdish beverages and jerked steaks, comes into modern music.
For he was in no sense as nobly human of stature, as deeply aware of the life about him, as Moussorgsky. Nor did he feel within himself Borodin's rich and vivid sense of the past. Cui was right when he accused Rimsky of wanting "nerve and passionate impulse." He was, after all, temperamentally chilly.
There is no score of his, for all the tang and luxuriousness of his orchestration, for all the incrustation of bright, strange stones on the matter of his operas, that has the deep, glowing color of certain passages of Borodin's work, with their magical evocations of terrestrial Asia and feudal Muscovy, their "Timbres d'or des mongoles orfevrèries Et vieil or des vieilles nations."
It is possible that the future will refer to him in even more enthusiastic tone. Borodin Borodin's music is a reading of Russia's destiny in the book of her past. "I live," the composer of "Prince Igor" wrote to a friend one summer, "on a steep and lofty mountain whose base is washed by the Volga.
And was not this restatement of the national character Borodin's great contribution to his age's life?
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