Born in Strasbourg, Valentin, the son of a postal clerk, studied musicology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1925 and was awarded a doctorate in 1928 with his dissertation Die Entwicklung der Tokkata im 17. und 18. Jahrhunder. In 1931, he published the first independent Telemann biography on the occasion of the 250th birthday of Georg Philipp Telemann. From 1928 to 1935, he was a teacher at the seminar for music education in Magdeburg and music correspondent for various magazines, then he worked as a critic and music writer in Munich until 1939. In 1935, he proved to be a loyal partisan of the NS-regime, when he wrote in Musikgeschichte als Bildungsfaktor an article titled "Das Bildungsideal des neuen Staates ist wie sein politisches Ziel die Totalität".Quote by Ernst Klee: Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2007, , .
