Yuri Keldysh was a Soviet musicologist and historian. He was born in St. Petersburg on August 29, 1907, and died in Moscow on December 11, 1995.
In 1930, Keldysh graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where his teacher was Mikhail Ivanov-Boretsky. From 1930 to 1950, he taught the history of Russian music there. He earned a doctorate in art history in 1947 and became a professor the following year. From 1946 to 1949, he headed the conservatory’s department of Russian music history.
Keldysh worked in Leningrad from 1950 to 1957, serving as a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory and holding teaching and administrative posts at the Leningrad Theatre Institute. After returning to Moscow, he worked at the Institute of Art History, where he led the music history section on the peoples of the USSR from 1961 to 1974. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Soviet Music from 1957 to 1961 and, from 1984, chief researcher at the State Institute of Art Studies.
His research focused on the history of Russian music, including the work of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff, as well as Russian music of the 18th century. He was among the early Soviet scholars to study Russian church music and prepared a series of publications on secular and sacred works from the 16th to 18th centuries. He edited the ten-volume History of Russian Music, published from 1984 to 1997, and the six-volume Music Encyclopedia, published from 1973 to 1982. His works included Russian Music of the 18th Century and Rachmaninoff and His Time. Keldysh was named an Honored Artist of the RSFSR in 1966 and received the Mikhail Glinka State Prize of the RSFSR in 1976 for his musicological work.