Peter Schacht

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Peter Schacht (born July 1, 1901 in Bremen , † January 25, 1945 in Posen ) was a German composer .

Life

Peter Schacht came from a wealthy Bremen merchant family. In his hometown he attended the humanistic grammar school, where he was particularly interested in mathematical questions. He also received piano, violin and clarinet lessons at an early age. Later (1931) he took part in a course given by the violin teacher Carl Flesch in Baden-Baden . After graduation in 1920, at the request of his father, he began to study medicine at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau . He also took composition lessons from the late romantic Julius Weismann . In Freiburg he joined the Corps Suevia in 1921 , which he left again in 1934 in protest against the exclusion of the so-called " Jewish Versippten ". From 1921 to 1926 he went to the Leipzig Conservatory , where he studied with Hans Grisch (piano) and Fritz Reuter (music theory and composition).

After that he wanted in the master class of Arnold Schoenberg at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin and applied to a neo-classical string quintet, which is considered his first preserved composition. After an initial refusal, Schönberg accepted him into his private group of students. His Variations on a Folk Song for Piano (1927) were probably composed under Schönberg . In the winter semester of 1927/28 he was officially Schönberg's (longest) master student (until 1932). In 1929 he created his important piano work Variations on a Theme by Bach . In 1932 his second sonata for violin and piano (1932) received "excellent recognition" at the Emil Hertzka Memorial Prize of the Universal Edition in Vienna.

After the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists, the Schönberg district dissolved. In 1933 his string quartet (1932) was premiered with scandal at the Dortmund Tonkünstlerfest. Schacht was not ready to withdraw the work as requested. He called it a "farewell performance in Germany". Until 1936 he lived withdrawn in the inner emigration in Berlin. There he also composed his important song cycle Seven Songs on Poetry by Richard Billinger (around 1933/36).

After 1936 he tried to gain a foothold again with tonal music for financial reasons . He withdrew from the performance of his Two Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1931) at the World Music Days of the International Society for New Music (IGNM) in 1937 . He had his Three Pieces for String Orchestra (around 1936/37) played in Winterthur at an event organized by the Permanent Council for International Cooperation of Composers , a National Socialist-dominated counter-organization to the IGNM. In 1940 his “story ballet” Andreasnacht was premiered under Winfried Zillig in Essen - although, according to Zillig, the music “looked very openly at jazz”, the performance was a success. In 1941 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht to guard British prisoners of war and transferred to Posen . There he composed the children's pieces for piano and a serenade (lost). Shortly before the end of the war in 1945, he was killed by a Soviet grenade during the Battle of Poznan .

Most of his works are documented in the Archive of the Deutsche Musikpflege Bremen. Influenced by Schönberg, “he composed an intelligent, technically skilled, if not very original music with a lyrical attitude”. At the beginning of the 1930s he created “ atonal music organized in series, which is by no means twelve-tone ” ( Ludwig Holtmeier ).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Peter Gradenwitz : Arnold Schönberg and his master students. Berlin 1925–1933 . Zsolnay, Vienna 1998, ISBN 978-3-552-04899-7 , p. 262.
  2. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 36 , 755.
  3. ↑ Peter Schacht , in KDG - Contemporary Composers , in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of the article freely accessible)
personal data
SURNAME Schacht, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH January 25, 1945
Place of death Poses