Born in
Dessau, Schmidt studied musicology from 1963 at the
University of Hamburg, as well as in
Tübingen, Paris,
Göttingen and Berlin. In 1970 he received his doctorate at the
FU Berlin from
Rudolf Stephan. Subsequently, Schmidt worked on the
Arnold Schönberg complete edition. After his
habilitation (with an analytical work on Schönberg's
Moses und Aron) and a professorship in Amsterdam, he held the chair of
Music history at
Technische Universität Berlin from 1991 until his
emeritus as successor to
Carl Dahlhaus. From 1992 he was project manager of the
Leipzig Edition of the Works of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy at the
Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A further focus of his work, besides the music history of the 19th and 20th centuries, is the work of
Johannes Brahms. Schmidt died on 16 October 2024, at the age of 81. == Publications ==