Tamara Livanova was a Soviet musicologist and professor. Born in Chisinau on April 18, 1909, she graduated from the theoretical and composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory in 1932, studying with Mikhail Ivanov-Boretsky. She completed postgraduate study there in 1940 and defended her doctoral dissertation that year.
Livanova taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1933 to 1946 and again from 1948 to 1954, becoming a professor in 1939. From 1944 to 1948, she was also a professor at the Gnessin Institute. Beginning in 1945, she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Art History of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Her research focused on Russian and Western European music of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, as well as Russian composers. Her books include History of Western European Music to 1789, Musical Dramaturgy of Bach and Its Historical Connections, Russian Musical Culture of the Eighteenth Century in Its Connections with Literature, Theater, and Everyday Life, and Mozart and Russian Musical Culture. She also wrote studies of Glinka and Myaskovsky and compiled a six-volume bibliography of Russian periodicals’ musical publications from the nineteenth century.
Livanova received the Order of the Badge of Honor in 1946. She died in Moscow on April 4, 1986.