Peter Schacht

Peter Schacht (1 July 1901 – 25 January 1945) was a German composer. Life Born in Bremen, Schacht came from a wealthy Bremen merchant family. In his home town, he attended the humanistic Gymnasium, being particularly interested in mathematical questions. Early on he also received piano, violin and clarinet lessons. which he left again in 1934 in protest against the exclusion of the so-called “Jüdisch versippt”. From 1921 to 1926 he went to the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, where he studied with (piano) and Fritz Reuter (music theory and composition). Afterwards, he wanted to enter the master class by Arnold Schoenberg at the Prussian Academy of Arts, which included Alfred Keller, Natalia Pravosudovich, Nikos Skalkottas, and Norbert von Hannenheim. Schacht applied for the class with a neoclassicist String Quintet, which is considered his first surviving composition. After an initial rejection, Schoenberg accepted him into his private circle of students which included . His Variations on a Folk Song for piano (1927) were probably written under Schoenberg. In the winter semester of 1927/28 he officially became Schoenberg’s (longest) master student (until 1932). In 1929 he c