Vetter first attended the Ulf-Merbold-Gymnasium Greiz [de] and then, until the Abitur, the Latina (Old school) of the Francke Foundations in Halle an der Saale.
From 1910, he studied musicology, art history and philosophy at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and conducting at the Leipzig Conservatory (with Hans Sitt, Stephan Krehl and Richard Hofmann).
From his academic teacher Hermann Abert, he received inspiration for his later research work, which ranged from music of ancient Greece to the composers of the 19th century.
[2] In mid-1934, Vetter was offered a non-permanent extraordinary professorship at the University of Breslau, where Arnold Schmitz held the chair at the time.
In the course of the appointment process in Berlin, in which he was named third after Friedrich Blume and Rudolf Gerber, the local Gaudozentenbundsführer Willi Willing described him as a "musicologist of medium format".
[3] In April 1941 he went to the newly founded occupied Poland and National Socialist-oriented[4] Reichsuniversität Posen [de], where he received a civil servant extraordinary ordinariate and became director of the Musicological Institute.
[5] He probably owed this position to Herman-Walther Frey, speaker on university matters in the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture.
[12] After the end of the war in May 1945, Vetter took up residence in the Soviet Occupation Zone, later the GDR, and in March 1946, after a year-long appointment procedure, was offered the full chair of musicology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, which had been vacant since the death of Arnold Schering in 1941.
He wrote studies and systematic manuals on ancient music, on Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert and Christoph Willibald Gluck.
[21] In keeping with the State ideology, he emphasized the secular work of the composer and Thomaskantor at the expense of his Protestant church music.
[22] While the party press gave the book a positive reception, Georg Knepler, himself a colleague of Vetter's in Berlin, was certainly critical.
), respectively the afterword, is considered tendentious, which is why research tends to fall back on the original edition of 1802 or the reprint of 2000 published by Claudia Maria Knispel.