Hector Berlioz Imagine him an auteur. Master of action-romance. Hair-raising slaloms give way to orchestral avalanches, wild mood swings, horror, tangled plots. Bardic allusions. He pursued an Irish actress with music’s first psychedelic proposal. A sick, depressed, avant-garde relic revered more abroad than at home, he awaited death at 66 with stoked opium pipe in hand. Alexander Borodin His university thesis was entitled “Analogy of Arsenical with Phosphorous Acid.” He was foremost a chemist and on weekends composed a lasting small body of charming work. At 53, in red shirt and boots at a fancy-dress ball in St. Petersburg, dancing with Polovtsian verve, he died at the stroke of midnight.