Lev Raaben

Lev Nikolaevich von Raaben was a prominent Soviet musicologist, violinist, teacher, and scholar of performance history, born on 19 December 1912 / 31 January 1913 in Grozny and buried in St. Petersburg at Smolensk Cemetery. He came from a noble family of Swedish origin that entered Russian service after the era of Peter the Great. His father, Nikolai von Frantsevich Raaben, was an engineer and later head of the mathematics department at the Grozny Oil Institute from 1920 to 1939.

Raaben studied the violin privately in childhood. After completing nine classes at the Grozny real school, he entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1930, but had to interrupt his studies for family reasons. After returning to Leningrad, he studied violin from 1933 to 1935 at the conservatory's music technical school with M. R. Lednik, a pupil of Leopold Auer, and then entered the conservatory in 1935, graduating in 1940 from the violin class of Y. I. Eydlin. At the same time, from 1937 to 1940, he studied at the department of the history and theory of bowed string performance under B. A. Struve. During his student years he played as a violinist in the Opera Studio orchestra, as a violist in the Leninsky Komsomol Theatre orchestra from 1937 to 1941, and also performed in the Udarnik cinema.

He entered postgraduate study under Struve in 1940-1941. During World War II he was evacuated with the conservatory to Tashkent, from where he went to the front as a member of the conservatory string quartet led by A. B. Merovich. Between 1942 and 1944 the quartet gave more than 700 concerts for military units. After returning to Leningrad, Raaben played viola in the State Operetta Ensemble under M. S. Bronskaya in 1945-1946 and in the quartet of the Leningrad Regional Philharmonic. After completing his postgraduate studies in 1945, he joined the teaching staff of the Leningrad Conservatory.

In 1948, he defended his candidate dissertation, "Instrumental Ensemble in Russian Music," a work that made an important contribution to the understanding of the formation and evolution of instrumental ensemble in Russia. At the conservatory he served as senior lecturer from 1945, acting associate professor from 1952, associate professor from 1963, acting professor from 1969, and professor of the Department of Violin and Viola from 1971 to 1978. He developed courses on the history, theory, and methodology of instrumental performance, as well as a postgraduate course on the history and methodology of bowed string playing. In 1968 he received the degree of Doctor of Arts; his doctoral work was linked to his book on Soviet chamber-instrumental ensemble music and to the broader theme of the history of Russian and Soviet violin art.

Raaben also pursued a long research career at the Leningrad State Research Institute of Theatre and Music, where he worked as senior research fellow from 1949-1950 and headed the music sector in 1950-1952 and again in 1968-1995. For decades he was one of the leading figures in Leningrad music scholarship, helping to shape promising scholarly concepts developed by colleagues and supervising more than forty candidate and doctoral dissertations. Among his students were M. G. Aranovsky, S. Ya. Levin, O. F. Shulpyakov, E. V. Gertsman, A. N. Kryukov, N. A. Ogarkova, N. S. Seryogina, and students from abroad including Laurel E. Fay, E. Rubina Milner, Lee Young Chung, and Im Ok Son. In his later years he also served as consulting professor at the Herzen Leningrad Pedagogical University from 1993 to 2002 and at Pushkin Leningrad State Regional University from 2000 to 2002.

Throughout his career, he published more than 140 research works devoted to conducting, music history, bowed string performance, twentieth-century composition, musical aesthetics, and the history and theory of musical performance. His extensive bibliography includes authoritative books on quartet performance, the violin and cello works of Tchaikovsky, Leopold Auer, Soviet chamber-instrumental music, Russian and Soviet violin art, and the lives of remarkable violinists and cellists. He also compiled and edited numerous musicological collections and served on editorial boards for major scholarly volumes.

In a number of studies, Raaben addressed new tendencies in Russian music of the 1960s and 1970s, including the work of Sergei Slonimsky, Andrei Petrov, Boris Tishchenko, Galina Ustvolskaya, Yuri Falik, Alexander Knaifel, Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, Edison Denisov, and Vladimir Artyomov. His later book "On the Spiritual Renaissance in Russian Music of the 1960s-1980s," published in St. Petersburg in 1998, reflected his continued engagement with contemporary musical thought. He also achieved international authority as a scholar, lecturing at the Sorbonne in 1973-1974, in Prague in 1975, in Bratislava in 1976, and at a UNESCO congress in Brno in 1977, while conducting methodological seminars in Poland from 1975 to 1987.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.