Kurt Weill grew up in a religious Jewish family. During his teens he started to get experience working in a theatre in Dessau, where he learned a lot from the theatre conductor Albert Bing. When he was 20 he went to study at the Berlin Musikhochschule where he studied with the composer Humperdinck. He did not like it there, and soon started a three-year period studying with the composer Busoni. Busoni was a good teacher for him and encouraged him to study counterpoint carefully in order to be a good composer. Then he introduced Weill to the music publishers Universal, who published all his music for the next ten years.