Erik Levi

Erik Levi is Reader in Music and Director of Performance at Royal Holloway. He studied in the Universities of Cambridge and York and at Berlin Staatliche Hochschule für Musik. An extremely versatile musician, he has interests both in the academic and practical aspects of music, having become a worldwide authority on German music of the 20th century especially during the Nazi era with the pioneering books Music in the Third Reich (1994) and Mozart and the Nazis (2010). He has also worked as a professional accompanist, appearing at the South Bank and Wigmore Hall, the Aldeburgh Festival and on over thirty BBC Recordings. A frequent broadcaster for BBC Radio 3, he also works regularly as a music journalist writing articles and CD reviews for BBC Music Magazine and International Piano. Erik Levi sits on the executive board of the International Forum for Suppressed Music at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and has organised a number of Conferences on topics that include music and national identity in the 1930s, the composition class of Franz Schreker, Music and Displacement, the impact of Nazism on twentieth-century music and most recently Hanns Eisler. The research students he has supervised have submitted PhDs on a wide range of topics including the use of Kitsch and popular culture in opera during the Weimar Republic, Paul Bekker, Alfredo Casella and Italian Fascism, the music of Matyas Seiber and most recently, the musical press in Franco’s Spain.