From the Alwinac: Schroeder Student Spotlight: Ernest Lachmund (1865-1954)

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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.]

Among the Oscar Cobb opera houses highlighted in my previous post was one that existed briefly in Duluth, Minnesota. In a surprise Schroeder connection, one of the musicians who made his studio in the Temple Opera Building before it succumbed to fire in 1895 was Ernest Lachmund, a cellist, pianist, and composer who counted Alwin Schroeder among his teachers. I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the Duluth concert organization Matinee Musicale (founded in 1900) in unearthing a cello piece by Lachmund that hadn’t been heard in a hundred years. Cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing’s subsequent performance of Lachmund’s rediscovered Waltz-Serenade for Matinee Musicale can be heard here.
    Ernest Lachmund’s father Gustav Otto Lachmund had fled Germany following the failed 1848 revolution, going first to Missouri, where Ernest’s older brother Carl was born in 1853, then to Clinton, Iowa, where Ernest was born in 1865. Carl and Ernest both studied music in Germany. Carl attended the Cologne conservatory as a piano and violin student from 1867 to 1871, and Ernest followed in his footsteps, arriving in Cologne as a 13-year-old in 1878. Two years later Ernest was at the Royal Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, studying chamber music with Joachim Quartet members Joseph Joachim, Emanuel Wirth, and Robert Hausmann, and cello with Anton Hekking. In Berlin Ernest attended the first local performance of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle and heard Brahms as a pianist. Meanwhile Carl had become an ardent follower and piano student of Franz Liszt in Weimar, and Ernest himself observed Liszt’s classes during the summer of 1884....
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