Boris Levik was a Soviet musicologist, teacher, and associate professor. He was born in Kyiv on 13 November 1898 and died in Moscow on 3 September 1976.
From 1913 to 1922, he studied at the Kyiv Conservatory, taking piano lessons with Konstantin Mikhailov and composition lessons with Reinhold Glière and later Boris Lyatoshinsky. After moving to Moscow, he continued studying with Glière. In 1928, he graduated from the historical and theoretical faculty of the Moscow Conservatory, where Mikhail Ivanov-Boretsky was his teacher.
Levik taught in the Moscow Conservatory’s music history department from 1930 to 1949 and became an associate professor in 1935. He defended his dissertation in 1941 on nineteenth-century German music criticism and writing about music. He also taught at the Correspondence Music-Pedagogical Institute and the Higher School for Military Conductors. From 1946, he taught at the Gnessin Musical-Pedagogical Institute, where he headed a department from 1946 to 1948 and again from 1953 to 1956.
His research focused on German and Austrian musical cultures. He wrote about Christoph Willibald Gluck, Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert, and Richard Wagner, and published teaching materials on European music for music colleges and conservatories. His books included Franz Schubert, Richard Wagner: The Ring of the Nibelung, and History of Musicology in Germany and Austria from the Late Eighteenth to the Late Nineteenth Century.