Robert Levin (musicologist)

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Robert David Levin (born October 13, 1947) is an American classical pianist, musicologist, and composer. He was a professor of music at Harvard University from 1993 to 2014 and led the Sarasota Music Festival as artistic director from 2007 to 2017.

Levin was born in Brooklyn. He went to Brooklyn Friends School and Andrew Jackson High School, and spent his junior year in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger. He earned a BA from Harvard in 1968, magna cum laude, with a thesis on The Unfinished Works of W. A. Mozart.

Early in his career, Levin led the theory department at the Curtis Institute of Music, then moved to SUNY Purchase as associate professor and coordinator of theory instruction, later becoming a full professor in 1975. From 1986 to 1993 he was a professor of piano at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg in Germany. In 1993 he joined Harvard as professor of music and is now Professor Emeritus. He was named Dwight P. Robinson Jr Professor of the Humanities in 1994 and served as head tutor from 1998 to 2004. In 2012, as Humanitas Visiting Professor of chamber music at Cambridge’s CRASSH, he gave lectures on Mozart and performed with the Academy of Ancient Music.

Levin’s work focuses on performance practice, keyboard playing, conducting, and music history and theory, with a strong emphasis on the Classical era. He is the Hogwood Fellow with the Academy of Ancient Music. He has completed and reconstructed many 18th-century works, especially unfinished Mozart and Bach pieces. Notably, he completed Mozart’s Requiem in D minor and Great Mass in C minor, reconstructing an Amen fugue from Mozart’s sketches. John Eliot Gardiner even asked him to write missing orchestral parts for Bach cantatas, such as Ach! ich sehe, itzt, da ich zur Hochzeit gehe.

As a performer, Levin is known as a soloist in Classical-era piano concertos, especially those by Mozart and Beethoven, and he often uses cadenzas and embellishments in the composers’ style. He has also composed several works. Levin is married to Ya-Fei Chuang, a pianist who studied with him in Freiburg.