Schmahl was born in 1929 in
Herford (
Westphalia) the son of a violinist and grew up in Berlin. He received his first violin lessons at the age of seven. After attending secondary school and passing his
Abitur in 1949, he studied for two semesters with the violin virtuoso
Max Strub at the
Hochschule für Musik Detmold. After the founding of the
GDR he moved to
Gustav Havemann at the
Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in East Berlin in 1950. The influential composer
Hanns Eisler was also one of his teachers there. In 1950, he was a prize winner of a competition of the
FDJ and in 1951 he qualified for the III
World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin. A study visit led him as the only violinist from the GDR to the Soviet pedagogue and virtuoso
David Oistrach at the
Moscow Conservatory. In 1953, he was a prize winner of an international music competition in Bucharest (Romania). Schmahl, who had joined the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany in the GDR, became the first
concertmaster of the
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Concert tours took him around the world as far as the US, and he repeatedly gave concerts in Italy and the Soviet Union. He had encounters with renowned conductors of those years such as
Franz Konwitschny,
Kurt Sanderling and
Kurt Masur. Schmahl also championed
Neue Musik by GDR composers, for example, he repeatedly performed
Ernst Hermann Meyer's concerto of 1963/64 and was responsible for the
premiere of the first two violin concertos (1963 and 1973) by
Gerhard Rosenfeld in Dresden. He played
chamber music among others works by
Igor Stravinsky,
Dmitri Shostakovich,
Sergei Prokofiev and
Hans Werner Henze. In 1963, Schmahl took on a teaching position and in 1970 a full-time lectureship at the
Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber. In 1971, he became
professor for violin and head of a
master class. In 1973, he moved to Leipzig, where from 1973 to 1984 he was
Rudolf Fischer's successor as rector of the
University of Music and Theatre Leipzig. Later, he was responsible for all master classes at the
Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin. Among his master students were among others Heike Janicke, Torsten Janicke, Ralf-Carsten Brömsel, Conrad Muck and Wolfgang Hentrich. In 1971, he was elected to the board of the international . In 1977, he was a member of the committee for the
Beethoven Honour of the GDR. He was also a member of the committee of the . As a juror, he participated in the
International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig. After the political turnaround he founded a
taxi company. == Family ==