Elena Bronfin

Elena Bronfin was a Soviet musicologist, teacher, and translator. She was born in St. Petersburg on April 29, 1911. She was the daughter of the music critic Filipp Bronfin and the midwife Rosa Bronfin, née Bukhman, and the family lived on the Fontanka Embankment in St. Petersburg.

She graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1932 as a piano student of Nadezhda Golubovskaya. She then completed postgraduate study in musicology under the supervision of Andrei Ossovsky in 1939. In 1942, while evacuated in Tashkent, she defended her Candidate of Arts dissertation, titled “French Opera in Russia in the Eighteenth Century.”

Bronfin later devoted biographical studies to both of her teachers. These included “A. V. Ossovsky. An Essay on His Life and Creative Activity” (1960) and “N. I. Golubovskaya — Performer and Teacher” (1978). She also prepared a collection of selected articles and memoirs by Ossovsky.

From 1931 to 1937 she worked as an editor at the Leningrad Radio Committee. From 1937 to 1945 she taught at the ten-year music school attached to the Leningrad Conservatory. Beginning in 1939 she also taught at the conservatory itself, in the department of the history of foreign music, and from 1950 she served there as an associate professor.

She was the author of several books on major European composers and musical culture, including “Jean Sibelius. An Essay on Life and Work” (1963, co-authored with V. N. Alexandrova), “Claudio Monteverdi. A Brief Essay on Life and Work” (1970), “Gioachino Rossini. Life and Work in Materials and Documents” (1973), and the teaching manual “On Contemporary Music Criticism” (1977). She also served as editor and compiler of such volumes as “Manuel de Falla. Articles on Music and Musicians” (1971) and “French Musical Aesthetics of the Nineteenth Century” (1974).

A final collection of her articles, “On Music and Musicians,” was published in 1994 after her death. Bronfin died in St. Petersburg on October 22, 1993.