How does a man who died in 1887 win a Tony Award in 1954, and how did that same man co-discover a chemical reaction still taught in universities today? This episode unpacks the divided life of Alexander Borodin, born illegitimate in St. Petersburg in 1833 to a 62-year-old Georgian nobleman and registered as the legal son of one of his father’s own serfs. Educated at home by private tutors because commoners were barred from the gymnasium, he grew up calling his mother his aunt while developing a passion for both science and music with no one telling him to choose.

Borodin enrolled in the Medical Surgical Academy in 1850, worked as a military surgeon, studied chemistry in Heidelberg and Pisa alongside Emil Erlenmeyer, and published foundational work on halodecarboxylation and the aldol reaction. He founded a school of medicine for women in 1872 and called himself a Sunday composer, writing music mostly when he was home sick. Yet with The Five he produced two symphonies, In the Steppes of Central Asia, two string quartets his friends resented, and the unfinished epic opera Prince Igor, which Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov completed after he collapsed and died at a ball at age 53.

• The legal fiction that made Borodin a serf owned by his own biological father until his emancipation at age seven
• The Hunsdiecker-Borodin reaction and the 1939 U.S. patent built on his early research
• Why Mussorgsky and The Five viewed his string quartets as fraternizing with German academic music
• The solar eclipse and the Polovtsian Dances in Prince Igor, and the friends who finished the opera after his death
• How the Broadway musical Kismet borrowed his melodies for Stranger in Paradise and earned him a 1954 Tony Award