1751–1802 · Germany · Classical
Corona Schröter (1751–1802) was a German actress, singer and composer who became a court vocalist and chamber singer in Weimar in the mid-1770s, close to Goethe's circle and his amateur theatre. She wrote songs for voice and piano, including a setting of "Der Erlkönig". On the site her music is represented by ensemble songs of intermediate and upper intermediate difficulty.
Corona Elisabeth Wilhelmine Schröter came into the world on 14 January 1751 in Guben. Her father, Johann Friedrich Schröter, an oboist in the regiment of Count Brühl, passed away in 1810; her mother, Maria Regina, came from a family of a shoemaker and tanner. Corona was the eldest of four children: her brothers Johann Samuel (1752-1788) and Heinrich (1760) became a pianist and a violinist, and her sister Maria Henriette (1766) was a singer too.
Once the family had settled in Leipzig, Johann Adam Hiller began teaching Corona to sing. It was there that she met Goethe — an encounter that left him with a strong impression of her.
As a child, Corona also studied other instruments, among them keyboard and guitar; this early musical training helped her both as a performer and as a composer. At the same time, her first singing lessons did her voice no favours.
Concerned that women's musical education was inadequate, Hiller opened his own coeducational school in Leipzig in 1771, where solfège, diction, vocal technique, Italian, and keyboard playing were taught. At this school Corona flourished as a singer and overcame the earlier damage to her voice.
At Hiller's school, Corona competed with another of his pupils, Gertrud Schmeling, later known as Madame Mara: Corona's voice was less powerful, but her admirers considered her performing style to have an intensity all its own.
In the mid-1770s, Goethe proposed Corona for the post of court vocalist and chamber singer at the Weimar court, and she moved there. Alongside performing, she also taught others to sing, among them the young Kristiane Neumann.
Her acting talent made Corona a leading performer in Goethe's amateur theatre: she appeared in at least eighteen productions there, many of them written by Goethe himself, and was the first to play the title role in "Iphigenie auf Tauris". In Weimar she also took classes at the Fürstliche freie Zeichenschule, a drawing school backed by Goethe.
Goethe's singspiel "Die Fischerin", staged in Tiefurt in 1782, held a special place among her work: Corona played the lead role of Dortchen and composed music for songs written for her to sing, including the ballad "Der Erlkönig" — this music is quite different from the version Franz Schubert wrote more than thirty years later. The painter Georg Melchior Kraus captured both the "Die Fischerin" scene and an earlier scene from "Iphigenie", in which Corona plays the title role and Goethe her brother Orest. This setting of "Der Erlkönig" is considered to have been the very first musical setting ever made of this poem.
In 1782, in his elegy on the death of the theatre figure Mieding, Goethe recalled Corona, crediting her with a role in shaping Weimar's theatre and in his own creative path. Seven years earlier, a work on the history of theatre had been dedicated to her, in recognition of her widely known abilities.
Between 1776 and 1782, Corona and Goethe worked closely on compositions that were performed in the Weimar theatre and also published for their personal libraries.
Professional actors took over from the amateur court theatre in 1783, and from then on Corona kept singing and acting only in informal settings; she also started giving singing lessons and turned to writing and art, before giving up all court performances for good in 1788. Those were the years she became friends with Friedrich Schiller, whose poems she later set to music.
These songs to Schiller's poems have not survived — nor have her two plays, hundreds of arias and duets, or the autobiography she gave Goethe in 1778. Two collections of her songs did survive, though: the first, containing twenty-five songs, came out in 1786 and included her version of "Der Erlkönig" from "Die Fischerin"; the second appeared in 1794, with many songs in French and Italian. The first collection was more popular than the second, probably because its music was simpler.
In the foreword to her first collection, Corona wrote that she had long hesitated before publishing it: propriety expected of a woman did not allow her to appear in public alone, without an escort, and she feared that experts would view a woman's work with indulgence.
In her final eight years, Corona devoted herself to teaching singing and acting. Lung and respiratory trouble led her to move to Ilmenau in 1801, together with her long-time friend Wilhelmine Probst, and there she died of tuberculosis on 23 August 1802; she was buried in Ilmenau Cemetery.
In memory of Corona Schröter, a school and a street in Guben were named after her, as well as a street in the southern part of Ilmenau. In Weimar's Park an der Ilm there is a Corona-Schröter-Weg, a path running right past Goethe's garden house.
Corona Schröter was a soprano, a court singer and an actress; she also composed songs, turning into music words written by Goethe and Schiller. On the site her music is represented by 22 editions, and all of them are written for voice and piano.
Eight editions are rated intermediate, and fourteen upper intermediate. Among them is "Der Erlkönig", originally written for "Die Fischerin".
A good place to start with her music is the intermediate songs "Der Brautschmuck", "Aufmunterung zur Freude", "Das Mädchen am Ufer" and "Brautlied", moving on to the upper intermediate "Lied der Morgenröte".
A reviewer of her first collection wrote that her compositional ability did not match her potential: the songs had a good deal of spirit, but the music did not always bring it out fully, though live performance helped one feel it; he attributed this to her lack of education, a common problem for women at the time.
Some of her songs appear on the site in two editions of different levels at once — for instance, "Das Mädchen am Ufer" exists in both an intermediate and an upper intermediate version. Among her other songs on the site are "An eine Blume", "Der Wassermann", "Amor und Bachus", "An den Mond", "Die Silberquelle" and "Der Winter".