Hermann Goetz

Hermann Gustav Goetz (December 7, 1840 – December 3, 1876) was a German composer.

Goetz was born in Königsberg, which was then part of East Prussia. After studying in Berlin, he moved to Switzerland in 1863. After ten years spent as a critic, pianist and conductor as well, he spent the last three years of his life composing. The conductor Felix Weingartner found it "incomprehensible that his delightful opera comique, Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung, should have entirely disappeared from the repertoire." Another great admirer of Goetz's compositions was George Bernard Shaw, who praised Goetz's Symphony in F above anything in the genre by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.

Goetz, the son of a salesman, came into contact with music early in his life. However, he did not receive his first serious piano lesson until 1857 — although he already had begun to compose some years before. At the end of the 1850s, he began to study for a degree in mathematics, but broke this off after three terms to study at the Stern conservatory in Berlin, where he studied piano and composition with Hans von Bülow. In 1862 he successfully graduated from the conservatory.

The following year, Goetz was appointed as city organist of Winterthur in Switzerland (thanks to the assistance of Carl Reinecke), where he taught the piano and began to make his name as a composer. In 1868 he married, and two years later moved to the village of Hottingen, today a suburb of Zurich, but remained employed in Winterthur until 1872. Between 1870 and 1874, he wrote reviews for a music magazine.

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