Life
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.
In the last years of his life, Goetz had to withdraw from teaching and concert performance due to the increasing seriousness of his tuberculosis, from which he had suffered from the 1850s and from which he would eventually die, aged 35, at Hottingen.
Read more about this topic: Hermann Goetz
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