His first musical studies were in Riga, where his teachers were Bror Möllersten and Jean du Chastain (piano) and Harald Creutzburg (harmony and counterpoint).
[1] From 1925 he was professor of piano at the Cologne Academy of Music but was forced to resign from his post by the Nazis in 1935 and became an 'inner exile', composing almost nothing until after the end of World War II.
He joined the Nazi Party in 1937; while not in sympathy with National Socialism, his decision was to avoid government harassment so that he could continue to work, like several other German musicians at the time.
He was also close friends with Ferruccio Busoni's pupil Philipp Jarnach, as well as Ernst Krenek, Artur Schnabel and Emil Nolde.
Like Tiessen and Schnabel, he was deeply impressed by Schoenbergian and Bergian Expressionism but did not adopt the twelve-note method, preferring a freely and often totally chromatic vocabulary with little or no sense of key.