Vladimir Protopopov was a Soviet and Russian musicologist, music educator, and university lecturer. He was born in Moscow on July 13, 1908, and died there on February 18, 2004.
He studied piano with V. A. Ziring from the age of 14, then studied theory with I. I. Dubovsky. From 1926 to 1930 he attended the composition department of the Nikolai Rubinstein Music College while working in the accounting department of the State Publishing House. In 1933 he entered the historical-theoretical faculty of the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1937 in Leonid Mazel’s class.
Protopopov taught at the music college attached to the Moscow Conservatory and at the Central Correspondence Institute for the Training of Music Teachers. He began teaching at the conservatory in 1938 and became a professor in 1961. From 1948 to 1959, alongside his conservatory work, he was a senior researcher and head of the music section at the Institute of Art Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In the 1960s he established a conservatory course on the history of polyphony.
His research focused on the theory and history of musical form and polyphony, and on Russian music from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. He received a candidate’s degree in 1942 for a dissertation on Sergei Taneyev’s chamber instrumental works, and a doctorate in art history in 1960 for research on Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar. His books include History of Polyphony and studies of musical form in the works of Bach and Beethoven. He received a prize at the 1960 international competition for musicological works on Chopin, was named Honored Artist of the RSFSR in 1966, and received the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 1996.