Larisa Kirillina is a Russian musicologist and art historian. She was born in Moscow on January 4, 1959. She graduated from the Sergei Prokofiev Children’s Music School No. 1 in 1976, the theoretical and composition department of the Academic Music College at the Moscow Conservatory in 1980, and the conservatory’s history and theory department in 1985. At the conservatory, she studied with Yuri Kholopov, researched Beethoven under N. L. Fishman, and took optional organ lessons with B. A. Romanov.
Since 1986, Kirillina has worked at the State Institute for Art Studies, where she became a leading research fellow in 1996. She joined the Moscow Conservatory in 1992 to teach music history; she became an associate professor in 2000 and a professor in 2003. From 1992 to 1998, she also taught music history at the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music. She has taught courses at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the Ino Mirković Academy of Music in Lovran, Croatia.
Kirillina defended her candidate’s dissertation, “Beethoven and the Theory of Music from the Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century,” in 1990 and her doctoral dissertation, “The Classical Style in Music from the Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century: The Era’s Self-Conception and Musical Practice,” in 1996. Her publications include Italian Opera in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1996), books on the classical style in music (1996 and 2007), Reform Operas by Gluck (2006), a two-volume study of Beethoven’s life and work (2009), and biographies of Beethoven (2015), Handel (2017), and Gluck (2018).