Abram Iosifovich Klimovitsky

Abram Iosifovich Klimovitsky (Leningrad, 7 September 1937) is a Russian musicologist whose work has focused on the genesis of composition, musical palaeography, and the relations between Russian culture and that of Western Europe. Trained at the Leningrad Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1961 after studying music theory with Yury Tyulin, he is one of the most respected names in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian musicology.

His academic career combined teaching with research. From 1962 he taught music theory at the conservatory in his native city, and in 1971 he joined the Russian Institute of Art History in Leningrad, where he obtained the kandidat degree in 1972. He received his doctorate in 1982 from the Institute of Academic Research for the Study of Art in Moscow, was appointed professor at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1985, and became chief researcher at the Institute of Art History in 1995. His membership of the Union of Composers of Russia since 1979, of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung since 1984, and of the Russian-German Tchaikovsky Society since 1997 also reflects his ties with institutions in several countries. He is, moreover, a lecturer and an acclaimed author on musical analysis, and in Russia he is regarded as a driving force behind innovative postgraduate programmes.

His early work dealt with sonata form in Domenico Scarlatti and then with Beethoven. In studying Beethoven's sketches, Klimovitsky analysed how the composer used them against stylistic inertia, and how they served as a model for later authors who wished to break with their predecessors without abandoning earlier traditions. His studies of Beethoven's copy of Palestrina's motet Gloria Patri and of the Quartet op. 132, as well as of a copy by Brahms of a Scarlatti sonata, are examples of this line of enquiry. In the 1980s and 1990s he compared Russian and German culture through Shostakovich and Schoenberg, and devoted numerous studies to Tchaikovsky, from the reception of his music during the so-called Silver Age to his relationship with Wagner.

As a palaeographer, Klimovitsky has located and attributed numerous manuscripts, among them documents by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. His method combines the study of the autograph with structural analysis, linguistics, German hermeneutics, psychology and semiotic theory, which has allowed him to revise the chronologies and readings of well-known works. His legacy lies in this interdisciplinary outlook, which places composition within its historical and cultural context.