Igor' Fyodorovich Bėlza

Igor Fyodorovich Belza (Kel'tse, now Kielce, in Poland, 1904 – Moscow, 1994) was a Russian musicologist who also composed and worked as a literary scholar. His output focuses above all on the music of Central and Eastern Europe, with particular attention to Czech, Polish and Slavic music in general, as well as to Russian figures such as Lyatoshinsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Glière.

He studied composition with Borys Lyatoshynsky at the Kiev Conservatory between 1922 and 1925, and then studied philology at the university of that same city. He taught at the Kiev Conservatory between 1925 and 1941, where he was appointed full professor in 1936. He also taught at the Moscow Conservatory between 1943 and 1949, and was on the staff of the Institute of Art History between 1954 and 1961. That same year he became head of the culture department of the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a post he exchanged in 1970 for that of scientific adviser, which he held until 1989. He also took part in various musical commissions.

In 1954 he obtained his doctorate with a thesis on Czech classical music. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Prague, in 1967, and from the Chopin Academy in Warsaw, in 1983, and was an honorary member of several European musical and literary societies. From 1965 until his death he presided over the Dante Society of the Academy of Sciences and was a member of the Pushkin commission.

His written output is extensive: monographs on Mozart, Dvořák, Borodin, Glière, Szymanowska, Novák, Chopin and Scriabin, as well as studies on the musical relations between Russia and Poland and between Russia and Czechoslovakia. His history of Polish musical culture was published between 1954 and 1972, and that of Czech musical culture between 1959 and 1973. As a composer he is credited with four symphonies, five piano sonatas, two sonatas for cello, a string quartet, an orchestral overture, film music and vocal pieces. His contribution to research on the history of Czech, Polish and Slavic music was notable, although the details of his compositions are not known with certainty.

Belza is remembered above all as a historian and biographer of Slavic music, whose works on Chopin and on musical Romanticism continued to be reissued for decades.