Fredric Kroll

A movement away from mere juvenilia makes itself noticeable in the ballad “Ulalume” after Edgar Allan Poe (autumn 1959), with which Kroll began, in effect, to discover his talent for vocal music.

During whatever spare time his studies afforded, Kroll continued to work on his own operatic version of “The Scarlet Letter,” completing the piano-vocal score on January 10, 1965, and devoting the subsequent months to writing his Senior Essay on the influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy on Richard Wagner's “Tristan und Isolde.” He received his A.B.

His following cycle to Italian texts by Henry Fregosi Loyzelle, “Frantumi” (“Shards of Glass,” 1967–69), is an antithetical experiment employing relatively sparse piano accompaniment.

Having originally intended to cease graduate school at this point and start teaching, the outbreak of the Vietnam War necessitated his studying for a Ph.D. to avoid being drafted, and he returned to Rochester, where he prepared his doctoral thesis on Klaus Mann.

From 1973 to 1974, in Berlin, Kroll completed his investigations into those of Klaus Mann's major works which his dissertation had not yet covered, and then received a part-time engagement as a teacher, more of German than of English, at Carl von Ossietzky High School in Hamburg-Poppenbüttel.

After the triumphant staged world premiere of his “Scarlet Letter” with piano accompaniment under Kroll's own direction at Cape Coral High School in Florida on January 10, 1981 (on the selfsame evening, the first Klaus Mann exposition of all time opened in Ahlen in Westphalia, West Germany), Kroll composed up to and including 2003 only two songs, “Den ungeborenen Enkeln” (“To the Unborn Grandchildren,” 1986, after Clemens Brentano) and “Der Steppenwolf” after Hermann Hesse (2000) – in his own estimation, two of his best works.

For this occasion, and during a kind of working holiday in Fortaleza, Brazil, Kroll also edited and translated into German for the Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, fragments belonging to the sphere of Klaus Mann's autobiography “Der Wendepunkt” which had hitherto been published only in English (under the title “The Turning Point,” 1942), in Swedish – or not at all.

After the centennial celebrations were over, Kroll began – again in Fortaleza – to carry out his intention, of which he had never lost sight, of orchestrating “The Scarlet Letter,” adding a considerable amount of counterpoint as he went along.