Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach

Memorial plaque for Hanning Schröder and Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach at Quermatenweg 148, Berlin-Zehlendorf

Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach (born August 24, 1900 in Breslau ; † October 11, 1997 in Berlin ) was a German music teacher, harpsichordist , musicologist and author. Baptized Evangelical, she was considered a Jew from 1933–1945 because of her Jewish grandparents.

Life

Cornelia (Cora) Schröder-Auerbach was the daughter of the Breslau pianist Max Auerbach (* 1872) and the sister of Klaus, Günter and Johannes Ilmari Auerbach and the niece of the Jena physicist Felix Auerbach .

After their parents separated in 1906, their mother, the teacher Käthe Auerbach (1871–1940), went to Jena with their two youngest sons , while Johannes and Cornelia stayed with their father for the time being. The childless uncle, Felix Auerbach, professor at the University of Jena, soon became the surrogate father of all children. Cora Auerbach grew up in her uncle's house in Jena, where artists and patrons like Clara Harnack , Reinhard Sorge , Eberhard Grisebach and Botho Graef frequented. She played keyboard instruments, the recorder and was a student of Max Reger .

In 1918/19 she was a music teacher at the Free School Community of Wickersdorf and had connections to the Wandervogel movement and the youth movement. From 1920 she studied musicology in Breslau, Munich, Jena and Freiburg ( Wilibald Gurlitt ), where she received her doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on The German Clavichord Art of the 18th Century . She was the first woman to have a doctorate in musicology in Germany and became head of department at the Berlin Academy of Sciences .

In 1929 she married the composer Hanning Schröder in Berlin. At the beginning of the 30s Schröder, his wife and the instrument maker Peter Harlan gave numerous concerts with medieval, renaissance and baroque music on historical instruments throughout Germany as the “Harlan Trio”. Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach was the driving force behind this ensemble, organized most of the concerts and also gave lectures on ancient music and the practice of these historical performances.

In 1930 she was visited by the newly divorced ex-wife Ingeborg (sister of Arvid and Falk Harnack ) of her brother Johannes Ilmari Auerbach and their son Wulf Auerbach, their nephew. Ingeborg then met his friend Gustav Havemann through Hanning Schröder and married him.

Because Hanning Schröder composed songs for workers' choirs and she did not deny her Jewish descent, Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach, like her husband, was banned from the National Socialist profession in 1935 by being expelled from the Reichsmusikkammer . Schröder-Auerbach and her husband moved into a semi-detached house at Quermatenweg 148 in Berlin-Zehlendorf in 1935 , which they acquired with his inheritance. From 1944 she lived with her daughter Nele with the Rienau family, who had come to the pastorate of Dargun in Mecklenburg in December 1943 when they had been bombed out in Hamburg , where, at Pastor Johannes Rienau's instigation, she worked for the parish as an organist and choirmaster from 1944 to 1952. Since the Schwerin upper church council of the Evangelical Lutheran regional church of Mecklenburg demanded so-called "Aryan proof" for the permanent employment of Schröder-Auerbach, which Pastor Rienau successfully put off the church leadership with reference to war-related difficulties, it was initially only suspended until further notice. From the beginning of 1944 to March 1945, Hanning Schröder and Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach hid the Jewish couple Werner and Ilse Rewald, who had gone into hiding, in their Berlin home and saved them from certain death.

In 1948 she was given the title of cantor as a permanent employee of the church . In the cultural alliance for the democratic renewal of Germany , first in Dargun, later in the Mecklenburg regional association and in the presidential council, she was involved in spite of a critical attitude towards the SED state. Although she and her husband lived in their own home again from 1952, which was now part of the US sector of Berlin, from 1954 to 1959 she was head of the work of the music section at the German Academy of the Arts in the city's eastern sector and brought up several publications on the Path. On January 1, 1959, she was released without notice. Afterwards she worked as a freelance music teacher and in music research. After the fall of the Wall, she was compensated.

Works (selection from own publications and collaboration)

• The German clavichord art of the 18th century , Leipzig 1930, Kassel 1953, 1959
• DG Turk: Little Handpieces for Piano (1932)
• R. Schumann: Complete Heine Songs (Leipzig 1956)
• JP Kellner: Selected Piano Pieces (Leipzig 1957)
• C. Fr. Zelter: Selected male choirs (Leipzig 1958)
• We compose with two dice. Musical educational game based on Mozart (Pößneck 1958)
• Carl Friedrich Zelter and the Academy. Monographs and biographies . German Academy of Arts, Berlin 1959
• Reviews, articles, reports and contributions, including in the concert book (Berlin 1958) and in programs of the German Academy of the Arts (about Max Reger , Arnold Schönberg , Bartok, etc.)
• Numerous contributions on record sleeves, 1970
• Women in the history of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Festschrift for the 175th anniversary, Berlin 1966, pp. 97–105.
• Moon and people ; 9 songs from “Chinese Flute” by Hans Bethge for soprano, flute and piano
• Small piano music for two large and two small hands
• Music for viola solo
• Plant cantata after poems by v. Hans Much . For soprano, flute and viola
• Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach & Maria Schmid: Johannes Ilmari Auerbach. Plastic - painting - graphics . City Museums Jena 1991
• Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach: A youth in Jena in: Jürgen John / Volker Wahl (ed.): Between convention and avant-garde. Doppelstadt Jena – Weimar , Böhlau, Weimar 1995, pp. 1–20 ISBN 9783412088941

Honors

Cover text from Between Music and Society Systems , commemorative publication for Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach on her 95th birthday:

“This Festschrift honors two personalities whose lives were as inseparable as they were“ rocky ”. Cornelia and Hanning Schröder are at least indispensable in Berlin's musical life in the second half of the 20th century, although both were hindered time and again in their artistic and scientific activities, so that their public impact was severely limited for many years. - The anniversaries of the musicologist and the native Mecklenburg composer are used here as an opportunity to honor both personalities with a collection of laudations and essays on the one hand and to portray their lives and work selectively, and on the other hand, the music and the musical life of the A critical review of the GDR and, thirdly, based on the musicological work of Cornelia Schröder, to present the latest research in the field of clavichord music. "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ usc.edu ( Memento of the original from August 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (English)  
2. ↑ jena.de ( Memento of the original from December 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

literature

• Meike Werner: Modernism in the provinces: cultural experiments in the fin de siècle Jena ; Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2003. ISBN 3-89244-594-X .
• Lilo Fürst-Ramdohr : Friendships in the White Rose . Verlag Geschichtswerkstatt Neuhausen , Munich 1995. ISBN 3-931231-00-3 .
• Hugo Riemann, Wilibald Gurlitt, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Carl Dahlhaus: Riemann Music Lexicon: Person Part LZ , Edition 12. B. Schott's Sons, Mainz 1961.
• Nico student: Hanning Schröder. Documents and critical catalog raisonné . Hamburg 1996. ISBN 978-3-928770-67-5 .
• Between note and society systems . Festschrift for Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach on her 95th birthday and in memory of Hanning Schröder on the occasion of his 100th birthday. (Frankfurt / M., Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna, 1996. Greifswald Contributions to Musicology, Vol. 2) ISBN 978-3-631-49832-3 .
• Nele Hertling:  Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era (LexM).

Web links

• Short biography and photo
• Series of publications: Repressed music. Nazi Persecuted Composers and their Works Volume 15