Bernd Goetzke was accepted at the Hanover University of Music at the age of 13 and studied with Professor Karl-Heinz Kämmerling. From 1969 to 1977, he worked with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who described Goetzke as his final student. He became a professor at the Hanover University of Music in 1982 where was head of the solo class course for 30 years and founded an institute for highly gifted children in 2000, which was the first one of its kind in Germany.  

In addition to his university work, Goetzke gives master classes worldwide and is often invited to international competitions as a jury member. In Positano, Italy, he continued the Beethoven courses founded by Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Cortot for several years. He describes Beethoven and Debussy as the two “focal points” of his repertoire. This is expressed, among other things, in his translation of around 500 letters from Debussy into German, published in 2018.