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.
