Eduard Mertke (17 June 1833–25 September 1895) was a

Baltic German Baltic Germans (german: Deutsch-Balten or , later ) were ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since their coerced resettlement in 1939, Baltic Germans have markedly declined ...

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

Life and work

Mertke was born in

Riga Riga (; lv, Rīga , liv, Rīgõ) is the capital and largest city of Latvia and is home to 605,802 inhabitants which is a third of Latvia's population. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava river where it meets the Ba ...

in what was then the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

. He studied music in Riga,

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

and after 1853 in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

under

Albrecht Agthe Wilhelm Johann Albrecht Agthe (14 April 1790 – 8 October 1873) was a German music teacher. Agthe was born in Ballenstedt to Karl Christian Agthe, a court organist and composer. He studied under Michael Gotthard Fischer in Erfurt, and in 1810 be ...

. He may have made his first appearance before an audience as a pianist already at the age of ten, and by 1850 played in both Saint Petersburg and Moscow. From 1859 he travelled as a pianist and then worked as a piano teacher in present-day Germany until 1869 when he became professor at the conservatory at

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ...

. He died in Riga. He composed two operas,

cantata A cantata (; ; literally "sung", past participle feminine singular of the Italian verb ''cantare'', "to sing") is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir. The meaning of ...

s, pieces for piano, hymns, songs and also around 210 Ukrainian folk songs. He was also an editor of other composers' work and composed arrangements for other composers' music.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mertke, Eduard 1833 births 1895 deaths Baltic-German people from the Russian Empire German music educators 19th-century German musicians 19th-century German male musicians