Alexander Rabinovich
Alexander Rabinovich was a Soviet teacher and musicologist. He was born in St. Petersburg on February 25, 1900.
From 1917 to 1918, he studied at the Faculty of History and Philology at St. Petersburg University. He studied composition at the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute in Kyiv from 1919 to 1921 with Boleslav Yavorsky, and later took piano lessons with Felix Blumenfeld. In 1924, he completed the Petrograd Conservatory as an external piano student. He studied musicology at the Leningrad Institute of Art History with Boris Asafyev, graduating in 1926, and completed postgraduate study there in 1930.
Rabinovich began teaching music history at music schools in Leningrad in 1922. He worked in Tbilisi from 1931 to 1933 and served as acting professor at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1933–1935 and 1940–1941. From 1933 to 1940, he headed the State Hermitage’s music culture section. From 1940, he worked at the Museum of Musical Instruments of the Leningrad State Institute of Art History.
His research focused on French music, the history of Russian musical theater before Glinka, and Soviet scholarship on Beethoven. His publications included studies of Joseph Haydn and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as well as writings on Russian opera before Glinka. He died in Novosibirsk on June 14, 1943.