Richard Beattie Davis was a prolific classical music collector of first editions. Over five decades his music publications were many and varied, culminating in his magnum opus — an exhaustive study of the Russian music publisher Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff earlier this year. Richard Beattie Davis was born in Croydon in 1922 and attended Weymouth College. In 1942 he joined the Border Regimentand served in Tunisiawith the Royal Tank Regiment and the 145 Royal Armoured Corps. Later in the war he was stationed in Italy during which time he was in charge of a prisoner of war camp and became friendly with a German violinist in the string quartet that performed there.

They were playing from unpublished Haydn minuets (composed in 1776), copies of which they had rescued from a library in Berlin. Davis requested copies and sent them to England and a performance on the Third Programme (now Radio 3), securing their place in the Haydn oeuvre for ever. After the war he qualified as a chartered surveyor, and joined the estate agent Knight, Frank & Rutley for whom he head the commercial valuation department, becoming a partner in 1963. Beattie Davis was a keen collector of first and early editions of Western and Russian music. He wrote articles on Henselt, Hummel, Balakirev, Lyapunov and Belaieff with exhibitions and talks in London, Germany and Florida. He wrote articles for the 2nd Edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In 2002 he was elected honorary president of the Internationale Adolph-Henselt-Gesellschaft based in Schwabach, Germany, to which he donated his original Henselt letters, first editions and study materials, including those on Henselt’s The Fountain that had been wrongly ascribed to the Russian composer, Gurilov.

From the 1980s Beattie Davis divided his time between Kent and Florida, and in 1984 he established The Richard Beattie Music Collection in the S. E Wimberly Library at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. He endowed this room with all his first editions of Beethoven, his extensive collection of Hummel and his chamber collection. However, his greatest gift to the library was his vast collection of first editions of Russian scores, many featuring exceedingly beautiful title pages. The Beauty of Belaieff is based on this incredible collection which according to the vice-president of the Moscow Conservatory, Elena Sorokina, was unrivalled anywhere in the world, including Russia.

His first wife, Elvira, died in 1974. He is survived by his second wife, Gillian, and his son from his first marriage.

Richard Beattie Davis, music collector, was born August 28, 1922. He died on September 6, 2008, aged 86