German-Jewish music pedagogue, harpsichordist, musicologist and author, also noted as the wife of composer Hanning Schröder.
She received her doctorate in 1928 with a dissertation on German clavichord art of the 18th century. She was the first graduate musicologist in Germany and was head of department at the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
In 1929 she married the composer Hanning Schröder in Berlin. Schröder, his wife and the instrument maker Peter Harlan gave numerous concerts of medieval, renaissance and baroque music on historical instruments as the “Harlan Trio” throughout Germany at the beginning of the 1930s. Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach was the driving force behind this ensemble, organizing the majority of the concerts and giving lectures on ancient music and the practice of these historical performances.
Because Hanning Schröder composed songs for workers’ choirs and because she did not deny her Jewish descent, Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach, like her husband, was hit by the Nazi prohibition. She moved to Mecklenburg, where she was organist and choirmaster from 1944 to 1952. From the beginning of 1944 until March 1945, Hanning Schröder and Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach hid a Jewish couple in their Berlin apartment and rescued the couple from certain death.
From 1954 to 1959 she was the director of the Music division at the German Academy of Arts in East Berlin. She died in Berlin on 11 October 1997, aged 97.
Link to Wikipedia biography (German)