Alexander Porfirevitch Borodin was born in St Petersburg, Russia in 1833 and died there in 1887. Actually the illegitimate son of an elderly Caucasian prince and the beautiful young wife of an army doctor, he was, according to the custom of the day, officially registered as the son of one of his father's serfs, one Porfiry Borodin. He became interested in music at the age of eight, and took up the flute, and later the piano and the cello, but remained an amateur all his life. In 1856 he graduated as a scientist and was appointed surgeon to a military hospital. In 1858 he was granted a doctorate for his thesis On the Analogy of Arsenical with Phosphoric Acid. On one of his many trips abroad he met and fell in love with a Russian pianist, Ekaterina Protopova, whom he later married.