Ernest Richard Kroeger

Ernest Richard Kroeger was an American composer. He is mainly known for the pedagogical works he composed for piano; he also taught music in St. Louis, Missouri. Today his papers are held at the Missouri Historical Society.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Ernest R. Kroeger.

From the period sources

Ernest Richard Kroeger, an “able American pianist, organist and composer” according to The New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1924), was born in St. Louis in 1862 and remained active there throughout his career. He studied in St. Louis with various teachers, including C. Kunkel, Spiering, and L. Mayer. From 1883, Kroeger served as an organist at different churches in St. Louis and taught at the Forest Park Seminary, while also gaining favor as a recitalist, performing notable series of piano-recitals in St. Louis and at institutions like Cornell University and the University of California. He also led choral societies from 1893 and served as music-director at Forest Park University from 1887, eventually heading his own music-school from 1904, where Isaac Leopold Schoen taught, and John Towers was also active, as noted by Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians: American Supplement (1920). Kroeger was recognized for his prominence in the Missouri and National Teachers’ Associations, and in 1904, he became a member of the French Académie, followed by membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1915, the same year he was one of the organists at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. His extensive compositional output included several overtures, an orchestral suite, chamber music, a piano sonata, and nearly 200 other piano pieces, alongside choruses and almost 100 songs, as detailed in The New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1924).