Borodin composed Prince Igor in his spare time from chemistry
Alexander Borodin is remembered for Prince Igor and In the Steppes of Central Asia, but he considered himself a chemist first and wrote music mainly on days off or when ill. In the lab he co-discovered the aldol reaction, a staple of organic chemistry, and he founded medical courses for women in Saint Petersburg.
Borodin was born in Saint Petersburg in 1833, born out of wedlock to Luka Gedevanishvili, a Georgian aristocrat then aged 62, and a Russian mother of 25. To hide the connection, the nobleman registered the baby as the son of one of his serfs, Porfiry Borodin, which technically made the child his own father's serf. He freed the boy at seven and housed him and his mother generously in a four-storey home, but never publicly acknowledged him. Barred from a proper gymnasium, Borodin was taught by private tutors.
In 1850 he entered the Medical-Surgical Academy in Saint Petersburg. After graduating he served a year as a military hospital surgeon, then studied in western Europe, including a stint from 1859 to 1862 in Emil Erlenmeyer's Heidelberg laboratory working on benzene derivatives, and time in Pisa. In 1861 he made methyl bromide from silver acetate, the first demonstration of a reaction later generalised by Heinz and Cläre Hunsdiecker. A 1862 paper described swapping chlorine for fluorine in benzoyl chloride, an early nucleophilic substitution.
Back in Saint Petersburg in 1862 he became professor of chemistry at the academy. There he studied how small aldehydes condense with themselves, the process now called the aldol reaction, whose discovery he shares with the Frenchman Charles Adolphe Wurtz; in 1873 he reported his results to the Russian Chemical Society, noting the overlap with Wurtz. He was a committed educator, opening medical courses for women in 1872 and teaching at the women's medical school until 1885.
Also in 1862, Borodin began composition lessons with Mily Balakirev and joined the circle known as The Five, composers set on creating a distinctly Russian classical music. His output includes symphonies and two string quartets as well as his famous tone poem and opera. By the 1880s work and poor health squeezed out composing, and he died suddenly at a ball in 1887.
Source: Alexander Borodin
