Scott Balthazar studied music history with Lawrence Bernstein, Norman Smith, Gary Tomlinson and Eugene K. Wolf, and music theory with Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour. He has lectured and published on stylistic aspects of nineteenth-century Italian opera and on contemporary theories of instrumental form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr. Balthazar is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and his articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicological Research, Journal of Musicology, Opera Journal, Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Current Musicology, Opera Quarterly, Music and Letters, and Music Library Association Notes. He won the scholarly essay contest of the National Opera Association in 1994. He edited and contributed two chapters for the Cambridge Companion to Verdi for Cambridge University Press (2004). Dr. Balthazar is writing the Historical Dictionary of Opera for Scarecrow Press.
Dr. Balthazar has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia. He has served as President of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the American Musicological Society, panelist-reviewer for the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Grants and Fellowships, at-large reviewer for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, contributor to the GTE Music Examination, and member of the Directoral Board for the U.S.-RISM Project to Catalogue Operatic Librettos in US Libraries. Dr. Balthazar taught previously at the University of Virginia.