Borodin’s opera featuring the Polovtsian Dances is Prince Igor.
The opera is based on The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, a medieval East Slavic epic about Prince Igor Svyatoslavich’s military campaign against the Polovtsians in 1185. Borodin wrote both the music and the Russian libretto, drawing on historical and literary material.
Borodin worked on Prince Igor for many years but left it unfinished when he died in 1887. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov later prepared the work for performance. Glazunov reconstructed or orchestrated portions from Borodin’s surviving sketches, while Rimsky-Korsakov assisted with the completion.
The Polovtsian Dances appear in Act II and are among the opera’s most frequently performed excerpts. They are often heard in concert independently, but within the opera they form part of the setting surrounding the captive Prince Igor and the Polovtsian Khan Konchak.