Prince Igor in the context of "Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov"

Alexander Borodin's Scherzo in A-flat major is a lively piece written in 1885, while Borodin was in Belgium for an early performance of his then incomplete opera Prince Igor. It was originally written for solo piano, but in 1889 Alexander Glazunov orchestrated it, along with the Petite Suite. Borodin dedicated the piece to Théodore Jadoul, who made a four-hand piano arrangement of it.

Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (12 November 1833 – 27 February 1887) was a Russian Romantic composer and chemist of Georgian–Russian parentage. He was one of the prominent 19th-century composers known as "The Five", a group dedicated to producing a "uniquely Russian" kind of classical music. Borodin is known best for his symphonies, his two string quartets, the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia and his opera Prince Igor.

A doctor and chemist by profession and training, Borodin made important early contributions to organic chemistry. Although he is presently known better as a composer, he regarded medicine and science as his primary occupations, only practising music and composition in his spare time or when he was ill. As a chemist, Borodin is known best for his work concerning organic synthesis, including being among the first chemists to demonstrate nucleophilic substitution, as well as being the co-discoverer of the aldol reaction. Borodin was a promoter of education in Russia and founded the School of Medicine for Women in Saint Petersburg, where he taught until 1885.

The Petite Suite is a suite of seven piano pieces, written by Alexander Borodin, and acknowledged as his major work for the piano. It was published in 1885, although some of the pieces had been written as far back as the late 1870s. After Borodin's death, Alexander Glazunov orchestrated the work, and added his orchestration of another of Borodin's pieces as an eighth number.

The suite was dedicated to the Belgian Countess Louise de Mercy-Argenteau, who had been instrumental in having Borodin's First Symphony performed in Verviers and Liège. She had also arranged for French translations of some of his songs and excerpts from Prince Igor; and had initiated the sponsorship of Camille Saint-Saëns and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray for Borodin's membership of the French Society of Authors, Composers and Editors.