The World of Opera

Let us start, for once, by giving credit to a critic. Vladimir Vasilevich Stassov was the monstrously learned archaeologist, librarian, and music critic who constituted an intimate adjunct to the Mighty Five of Russia—Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Moussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakoff. Among the many services he performed for these composers (including writing biographies of all but Balakirev) was the suggestion to Borodin of Prince Igor as the subject for an opera. Not only did he suggest it, he also wrote out a synopsis for the libretto.
 

The source of the story is a fourteenth-century prose poem entitled Song of the Army of Prince Igor, which deals with a twelfth-century military expedition undertaken against the Tartars. To understand it properly—particularly the prologue and Act I—one should know that Novgorod was, at that time, a cross between a democracy and a constitutional monarchy. That is, the princes were elected, their chief function was to act as military leaders, and they derived their authority and subsidies from their subjects, not from the nobility.
 

But it was not so much the political aspects of the story that attracted Borodin as it was the chance to write music in contrasting colors—Russian and Tartar. And how well he took advantage of it!
 

Borodin (1834-1887) was a chemist—and a distinguished one—by profession, a composer only by avocation. It may have been for this reason that, while Stassov came up with his notable suggestion as early as 1869, the score was still uncompleted when Borodin died of a heart attack, eighteen years later, during a costume party he was giving in his own home. Rimsky-Korsakoff and Glazounov, with help from Liadov, orchestrated more than half the opera and completed the composition of several of the scenes that remained unfinished. But these composers often worked so closely with each other (they had shared assignments for different parts of the same string quartet, the same ballet) that it is almost impossible to detect where one hand leaves off and the next begins. Stassov left an account of who did what, but so well did they subject their individualities that it is a matter of interest only to the historian.