Mikhail Saponov is a Soviet and Russian music historian and musicologist, textual scholar, poet-translator, and educator. Born in Shchyolkovo, Moscow Oblast, on April 2, 1946, he studied music at School No. 12 with teacher Viktor Chepurov. At age 11, he performed the role of the Owl in the children’s opera Geese-Swans.
Saponov graduated from the Gnessin Musical College in 1968 and from the theory and composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory in 1973, where he studied with Yuri Kholopov. He completed postgraduate study in the history of foreign music in 1976 under T. E. Tsytovich. His research interests include 20th-century Russian music, Latin American composers, and medieval and contemporary European music. In 1978, he defended a candidate dissertation on Cuban musical culture and folk traditions in professional composition.
From 1976, Saponov taught in the Moscow Conservatory’s Department of the History of Foreign Music. He became an associate professor in 1985, a professor in 1993, and head of the department in 1990. In 1992, he defended a doctoral dissertation on the musical art of European minstrels; it was published four years later as Minstrels: Studies in the Musical Culture of the Western Middle Ages. From 1992 to 2002, he led the student creative center Collegium of Early Music. From the early 1990s, he lectured abroad and conducted research in Germany and Switzerland. He joined the Association of Musicologists of Central and Eastern Europe in 1995.