Evgenia Chigareva is a Soviet and Russian musicologist, philologist, educator, and music critic. Born in Voronezh on February 13, 1939, she graduated from the philology faculty of Moscow State University in 1962 and from the Moscow Conservatory with a degree in musicology in 1968. She completed postgraduate study at the conservatory in 1972.
Chigareva taught at the Children's Music School attached to the Moscow Conservatory’s Music College from 1963 to 1970, then taught theoretical subjects at the college from 1970 to 1985. She joined the Moscow Conservatory’s Department of Music Theory in 1985, became an associate professor in 1986, and was appointed professor in 2002. She earned her candidate degree in 1977 with a dissertation on how expressive means shape the individuality of a musical work, using Mozart’s music from his final decade as a case study. In 1998 she completed a doctorate in art history with a dissertation on Mozart in the cultural context of his time, focusing on artistic individuality and semantics.
Her research has focused on Austrian culture, Mozart and his contemporaries, musical language and semantics, and the relationship between words and music. She has also written on twentieth-century music, including the works of Bela Bartok, Alfred Schnittke, and Alexander Lokshin. Her books include Alfred Schnittke: A Sketch of His Life and Work, co-written with Valentina Kholopova; Mozart’s Operas in the Context of Their Time: Artistic Individuality and Semantics; The Artistic World of Alfred Schnittke; and Features of Form in Vocal Music: Methods of Analysis, published in 2024.
In 1992, Chigareva received an award at the Third All-Union Competition of Musicologists for her book on Alfred Schnittke, co-written with Kholopova. She also undertook a research fellowship at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in 1992–1993.