Hermann Goetz

Hermann Gustav Goetz (7 December 1840 – 3 December 1876) was a German composer who spent much of his career in Switzerland. He is best known for his 1872 opera Der Widerspänstigen Zähmung, based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Life Goetz was born in Königsberg in the Province of Prussia. The son of a salesman, he 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 graduated from the conservatory. He then moved to Switzerland in 1863. 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 Zürich, but remained employed in Winterthur until 1872. Between 1870 and 1874, he wrote reviews for a mu