Edward Goll

Edward Goll (4 February 188411 January 1949) was a Bohemian pianist who settled in Australia in the 1910s and became a noted piano teacher at the Melbourne University Conservatorium of Music. His students included Margaret Sutherland, Waldemar Seidel and Dot Mendoza. He was also the target of anti-German feeling during World War I, despite having become a British subject at the start of the war.

Biography Edward Goll was born in 1884 in Kaaden, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Kadaň, Czech Republic). His first instrument was the violin, which he studied under Otakar Ševčík; he gave his first concert at the age of nine. He entered the Prague Conservatory, where his focus changed to the piano, and where he was one of only a handful of personal students of Antonín Dvořák. He later had tuition from Emil von Sauer, a student of Franz Liszt. Goll was considered a wunderkind in his time, and often played for Queen Marie of Romania, who showered him with honours and gifts.

In 1911, Edward Goll was accompanist to the Welsh tenor Ben Davies on his tour of Australia. In Melbourne he fell in love with a local widow, and they married early the following year, honeymooning in England, and making Melbourne their home. In 1915 Henri Verbrugghen, the inaugural Director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, offered Goll a post there, but he accepted an alternative offer from the University of Melbourne Conservatorium, and also became musical director for Presbyterian Ladies' College, Melbourne. Waldemar Seidel (the teacher of Noel Mewton-Wood, Don Banks, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and others), Nancy Weir, George Vern Barnett and Linda Phillips.

In the early 1930s he left the Conservatorium after a disagreement. He left PLC in 1935, and taught privately for the rest of his life. He died in 1949, aged 64.

From as early as 1902 Goll made a large number of 78 recordings, now held by the National Library of Australia, but very few are currently available; his recording of two pieces by Max Reger has been released on CD.

Cyril Scott's 1912 realisation of Sumer Is Icumen In was dedicated to Edward Goll.

The musicologist Elina Yasumoto has written a memoir titled Edward Goll: A Light in Dark Times.