Jeffrey Kallberg (Ph.D., 1982, The University of Chicago) is a specialist in music of the 19th and 20th centuries, editorial theory, critical theory, and gender studies. Kallberg has published widely on the music and cultural contexts of Chopin, most notably in his book, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Harvard University Press). His critical edition of Luisa Miller, for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (Casa Editrice Ricordi and The University of Chicago Press), has been performed throughout the world at such venues as the Cincinnati May Festival; the Teatro alla Scala, Milan; the Rome Opera; the Nederlandse Opera, Amsterdam; the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich; the Zurich Oper; the Oslo Philharmonic; the Teatro San Carlo, Naples; Biwako Hall, Osaka; Orchard Hall, Tokyo; the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and the Salzburger Festspiele, Salzburg.  Kallberg is also the author of the articles on “Gender” and “Sex, Sexuality” for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed., (London, Macmillan, 2001). Together with Olivia Bloechl and Melanie Lowe, he edited the collection Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge University Press).  His current projects include books on Chopin’s nocturnes and on Chopin’s things, and an investigation into the links between ideas of landscape and modernism, especially in Scandinavian music from the first half of the twentieth century.

Kallberg’s reconstruction of Chopin’s first sketch for a Prelude in E-flat minor for the eventual set of Preludes, op. 28, was the focus of a profile in The New York Times.  For a full account of this experimental work (set entirely over a series of trills in the left hand), see Kallberg’s article in the British journal Early Music vol. 29 no. 3 (August 2001), pp. 408-422.  Click here for a fine performance of the work by Roberto Poli, and here for a tutorial on the piece by Paul Barton.

In August, 2005, the Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania called upon Kallberg to identify and authenticate an autograph manuscript of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (in the composer’s arrangement for piano, four-hands) that was discovered in their library.  The 80-page manuscript, one of the last that Beethoven completed before he died, preserves fascinating evidence of his compositional thinking; its reappearance after some 115 years caused considerable excitement across the musical world.  In December 2005, the manuscript sold at auction for nearly $1.9 million to Bruce Kovner, who shortly thereafter donated it to the Juilliard Conservatory as part of the Juilliard Manuscript Collection.

Kallberg served as production consultant for two plays with music by Hershey Felder: Monsieur Chopin, which premiered at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago in 2005, and Beethoven, As I Knew Him, which premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 2008.  In 2024, he was the historical consultant for Felder’s feature-length film Noble Genius: Chopin & Liszt.

Kallberg was elected Vice President of the American Musicological Society for the term 2004-2006.  He was the Review Editor of the Journal of American Musicological Society and, with Ruth Solie and Anthony Newcomb, was general editor of New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge University Press). His awards for publications include the Alfred Einstein prize of the American Musicological Society (for best article by a younger scholar), the Richard S. Hill award of the Music Library Association (for best article on a bibliographical topic), and the Stefan and Wanda Wilk Book Prize for research in Polish Music.  He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  In 2004, he was the Rayson Huang Fellow at the University of Hong Kong.  In 2009 he was named a distinguished alumnus of The University of Chicago.  He also has twice been guest of honor at the International Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland.  From 2016 to 2019, he served as a trustee on the Central Board of the Settlement School of Music in Philadelphia.  In 2019, he was appointed to the “Rada Programowa” (“Programme Board”) of the Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina [“Fryderyk Chopin Institute”] in Warsaw, Poland.

Since 2010, Kallberg has served as Associate Dean for Arts and Letters in the School of Arts and Sciences.  In October 2024, he was appointed Deputy Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.

In 2024, and to his stupefaction, Kallberg was inducted into the Venice High School Hall of Fame.

Kallberg speaks often at scholarly conferences and colloquia around the world, and frequently gives pre-concert lectures at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.