Walter Thomas Heyn was born in Görlitz in 1953 and was initially a self-taught musician. From the age of fourteen, he played guitar and performed in choral societies. From 1974 to 1980, he studied guitar with Thomas Buhé and Roland Zimmer, arrangement with Gerd Schlotter, and composition with Carlernst Ortwein at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig. His composition teacher recommended him for Siegfried Thiele's class. From 1985 to 1987, Heyn was a master student of composition under Siegfried Matthus at the Academy of Arts in East Berlin. He also served as a senior assistant in music theory at the Leipzig Academy of Music until 1984.

In the 1980s, Heyn devoted himself to opera, theater music, and song. His first composition, Four Aphoristic Songs (1980), was featured in a composer portrait at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. His works incorporated, among other things... Texts by Anna Akhmatova, Agostinho Neto, and Andreas Reimann. His musical compositions are often socially critical and cynical. In 1987, he composed "Ich ist ein anderer. Rimbaud" (I is another. Rimbaud) for the Hanns Eisler New Music Group. From 1989 onward, he concentrated on chamber music. In the late 1990s, he began composing works that combined literature and music. He collaborated with the chanson singer Barbara Kellerbauer. Heyn composes in all styles, from Romanticism to contemporary music. He is also an arranger of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Claudio Monteverdi, Modest Mussorgsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Instrumentation : Violin, Clarinet and Guitar.