Goltermann: amended thoughts

After re-reading the brief paragraph on Georg Goltermann by Margaret Campbell in her very worthy book "The Great Cellists" I decided a post addressing the comments she made about him as composer warranted another post.

It's not that I wholly disagree with her and the fairly harsh pronouncement on Goltermann's decided course of change in career, but rather that I find it more an annoyance. It sounds as if she searches for some witty comment at the expense of a lesser known cellist/composer simply to fill what little space she had intended to commit to him in her book.

While Herr Goltermann's works are not particularly inspired or inspiring to listen to, they do serve a significant purpose. That purpose is one needed in the field of teaching and learning. For those students who are not so technically advanced much of his opus created a way for those students to show off in the level they had acquired. To me this is a very courageous act on the part of the virtuoso cellist since he probably knew that writing such music would not push him into fame in the realm of compositional greatness.

However, to justify Campbell's comment at least in part, I offer the following observation. After reading several of his concertos and some character pieces that are certainly intended to be played by the advanced performaer there is much left to be desired. Yes, he provides decent melody and some exciting passage work and then some more passage work that repeats itself or is a slight variation on the first rendering of the passage--if that makes any sense.

In short, there are a few pieces worthy of the concert stage or at least in a soiree. However, most other compositions are mainly useful as teaching material. He makes one work fairly hard for the virtuosic licks, meaning that technique must be well developed to execute those passages well. This refers mostly to his concertos 1,2, 5, and 6, which I have read a few times just to be sure I was not having a knee jerk sort of reaction to the writing.

In the end though, I think we would be prudent to give this music some chance and at least the benefit of the doubt for study purposes.