Konchakovna's Cavatina from Aleksandr Borodin's Prince Igor: A Transcription & Arrangement for Piano Trio

While Aleksandr Borodin enjoyed a varied career as a composer, he was a chemist by profession and made his living as such. Although his focus was primarily on academic life as a chemistry professor, his musical style still managed to evolve in remarkable ways: from a more Western-European style to the style of Russian nationalism of the late 19th century. While Borodin did compose early chamber works featuring the piano, during this stylistic shift, his chamber music output notably excluded the piano, as he switched his focus to string quartets. Additionally, he dedicated many of these later years to producing large-scale symphonic works and the opera Prince Igor. The purpose of this project is to address a lost opportunity: There is sadly no chamber music in Borodin’s mature style that features the piano. His masterpiece, Prince Igor, is the work of a mature composer, and Konchakovna’s Cavatina from the opera’s second act was chosen to serve as the basis for an arrangement for traditional piano trio: violin, cello, and piano. This aria for contralto is rare in that the themes and orchestration all are attributed to Borodin, while much of the rest of the opera was completed by other composers of the time. I have created two arrangements of this scene: a literal transcription that maintains the integrity of the original composition, in which the vocal line of the aria is given primarily to the violin, while the orchestral parts are divided between the cello and the piano, and a second arrangement that alters much of the piece for compositional variety, in the spirit of other arrangers such as Franz Liszt or Jascha Heifetz. In the second version, there are creative interpolations, countermelodies, harmonies, and new figuration to fully utilize the qualities of a piano trio. This paper explains the methods used in the creation of these arrangements, accompanied by examples from the score, and can serve as a model for other musicians who wish to create their own arrangements of pre-existing musical materials.