A Schroeder Etude

By Geoffrey Dean

Like so many other cellists, I grew up using a collection of studies that are often affectionately referred to as “the Schroeder Etudes.” In 2012 I started thinking about the man who compiled them just over a hundred years ago, and I realized how little I knew about his life. What more could I learn about him? The few brief biographical paragraphs about Alwin Schroeder that were readily accessible online didn’t seem to do justice to an artist who was once hailed as “America’s Greatest Cellist.” I set out to learn more about him and give him the more complete biography he deserves, using mainly online resources such as historical newspaper and magazine articles and especially performance reviews to create a picture of the kind of performer Schroeder was and trace his career path from Berlin to Leipzig, from Leipzig to Boston, from Boston to New York, and then (briefly) to Frankfurt, and finally back to Boston. Written over the course of 2012, the resulting sketch was, as far as it goes, adequate and in any case an improvement on the biographical information that had been available to that point.
    As I researched and wrote it, I began to wonder whether it might be possible to expand the scope of my Schroeder study. There seemed to be so much more to Schroeder’s life and times, and I wanted to try to tell the story. But how? So many details were seemingly lacking. Aside from his many performances and publications for cello, what other traces of Alwin’s life were there to draw on? Reputedly a person of extreme modesty, he himself seemed to have little to say that he didn’t say through music. And aside from two modest biographical sketches, what relevant experience could I bring to bear in a large-scale biography? I think, I imagine, I write, and playing the cello has been a large part of my own career. Could that be enough? It might be too much – what if, in reimagining Alwin’s life, I turn him into someone else, someone resembling no one as much as...me?
    My dream of writing a book-length biography of Alwin Schroeder is still alive. I continue to search for every scrap of information I can find on him. I continue to be amazed at each new discovery, however minute, because I know that someday I will put them all together. I am still convinced that they can be put together, and that if I don’t do it, who will? I regularly shake my head in bemused dismay at the unsystematic nature of my inquiry as I fill in gaps here and there in my Schroeder timeline, conduct random Google searches, and realize that there are archives in both Germany and the U.S. that do contain letters from Alwin, even if only New Year’s greetings or an apology for being unable to attend a colleague’s concert. Slowly I’m extending the network of people who were in Alwin’s orbit. As I come to terms with the challenge of building a narrative that is as much around Alwin as it is about Alwin, I recognize more fully how these two approaches serve the same ultimate goal.

My latest realization is that I can also learn a lot more about the art of writing biography by studying existing examples. I have yet to read a book about biography-writing (perhaps writing this piece will be the catalyst?). I do periodically pause to reflect on the biography-like writings that I have most enjoyed as a reader: Josef Skvorecky’s Dvorak in Love, Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, and Irvin D.Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept. What they have in common is that the imagination of each author has overtaken his subject in a personal way, making them more works of fiction than actual biographies. I also think of my father’s poetic retelling of the Wright Brothers’ first successful flight. It too I admire as a piece of writing that captures the essence of its historical subject in a unique way and creates a satisfying experience or journey for the reader to be drawn into, without necessarily consisting entirely of 100%-verifiable historical facts.
    I contrast this sort of creative achievement with the scholarly work of a musical biographer such as Maynard Solomon, author of books on Mozart and Beethoven. What stays with me from Solomon’s Beethoven biography is how two or three bizarre features of Beethoven’s self-perception (e.g., his encouragement of the idea that he was of noble birth when in fact he was not) permeate Solomon’s interpretation of significant events and episodes in Beethoven’s life. I have a similar recollection about Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, where the constant tug-of-war between Catholicism and Protestantism within and without Shakespeare’s immediate family informs and tightens the narrative thread (rope?).
    In Alwin Schroeder’s life I see some corresponding features: to my knowledge, he never publicly corrected the romanticized misperception that his father was an opera composer, and there was a certain tug-of-war between the lure of America and the ultimately unattainable promise of an idyllic retirement in his native country. The Dvorak novel (it is, properly classified, a historical novel) is written with a kind of silent soundtrack woven through Skvorecky’s narrative, where Dvorak’s compositions serve as musical landmarks along his way, as his means of relating to the world, and as our means of getting in touch with Dvoraks’s inner life. The idea of musical works as biographical landmarks or windows into the subject could certainly be applied to Schroeder, but which works to choose, and how far could I get those windows to open? A poetic treatment could work for a specific episode, such as the Schroeder Brothers quartet (in which the teenaged Alwin played viola) playing Beethoven’s Op. 131 for their patron, the Duchess of Ballenstedt, but the ratio of required imagination to known facts seems to weigh heavily against it.

As my Schroeder biography-building process continues, my concern that he will become too much a reflection of me also takes the opposite form – will I become (or am I already?) too much a reflection of (how I imagine) him? Recently I learned that a local concert venue has a historical Mason and Hamlin, the brand of piano that Schroeder endorsed and had in his home. My immediate thought was that I must recreate a cello recital program that Schroeder played at the time (1908) that his Mason and Hamlin ad appeared. Then it occurred to me that really I am trying to engage, in whatever ways I can, in a dialogue with Alwin, and that those ways can include playing music from another collection he published, called Alwin Schroeder’s Concert Repertoire. These are pieces that he played as solos or encores in Germany in the 1880s and later around the U. S., that illustrate his approach to the cello, to giving it voice as a recognized “Violoncello-singer.” I can’t sing with Alwin’s voice, but I can try to sing with some of his preferred pieces, exploring the relationships with other music and the people who created and performed it.
    Another window into a dialogue with Alwin might, I thought, be the interview format. What would I ask, and how might he answer? And again, conversely, what might he ask me? And this brings me to a new “moment of truth” that could reveal the actual current state of my Schroeder study.

Copyright © 2018 by Geoffrey Dean