Andre Asriel

Andre Asriel (22 February 1922 – 28 May 2019) was an Austrian-German composer. Life Born in Vienna, Asriel first attended the Akademisches Gymnasium and then the Bundesgymnasium IX (Gymnasium Wasagasse) in Vienna, where the later Oscar winner and composer Ernest Gold was his classmate. Here he pursued musical studies at the same time, studying piano with Grete Hinterhofer and theory with Richard Stöhr at the State Academy of Music in Vienna from 1936 to 1938. He was extraordinarily gifted and an outstanding pianist even at a young age. After the Anschluss to Nazi Germany, his mother ensured that her 16-year-old son Andre was able to emigrate to England with a Kindertransport as a racially persecuted person at the end of 1938. She herself did not manage to escape. With the beginning of the war in September 1939, all ties to the old homeland and the family were severed. Music was Asriel’s interest even in a foreign country, but he did not know how to start and finance a suitable course of study. Through an encounter with the later poet Erich Fried - also a former pupil of Wasagymnasium - he found contact with the exile organisation Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), which also financed his