From the Alwinac: Alwin Schroeder’s Bach Cello Suites Edition

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

Alwin Schroeder’s 1888 edition of the Bach Cello Suites is often overlooked in the literature on the suites. I believe it deserves detailed study as a “missing link" between the earliest editions of the suites and ones that came soon after it, such as those of Becker and Klengel. In his 2016 dissertation on the Bach cello suites, Zoltan Szabo does mention the Schroeder edition, discussing it in relation to the more obviously influential second Grutzmacher edition of ca 1885, and quickly dismissing Schroeder’s version as lacking in originality. Next to the famously, sometimes scandalously original Grutzmacher, surely just about any cellist of the time would seem unadventurous in their editorial choices. But for me the question is different, because in my opinion Schroeder never intended to insert his own personality into the suites (or any other cello music) the way that Grutzmacher, Becker, and other cellists have. So what was Schroeder trying to do in his edition of the suites?
    Today cellists and editors often go back to the original manuscript sources for the suites, piecing together a satisfactory (textually accurate, aesthetically authentic, personally pleasing) reading of the suites through a kind of dialogue with the composer and others from Bach’s own time. Schroeder also engaged in a dialogue, but it was more about Bach than with Bach, and it wasn’t through the medium of the manuscript copies (which likely weren’t available to him anyway), but of previous editions and the cellists behind them. His edition has no prefatory explanation of his approach, but as he showed us later with the 170 Foundation Studies, Schroeder was adept at assimilating and reorganizing a broad range of pre-existing materials in a meaningful way. I think his approach to the Bach suites is similar, while still revealing some personal touches. To me Schroeder’s edition reads like an opinion statement on the status of cellistic knowledge and tradition regarding the suites and their interpretation at the time.
    A comparison of the Schroeder Bach suites edition with the handful of editions that predate it reveals very clear connections with the ideas about playing Bach on the cello that editors such as Norblin, Dotzauer, Grutzmacher (in his second edition), and Dorffel passed down. Taking the first suite as a case study, and looking at specific editorial parameters, I will now discuss these relationships in more detail….
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