Fredric Kroll

Fredric Joseph Kroll (7 February 1945 – 12 February 2026) was an American-German composer and writer. Life and career Kroll was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 7 February 1945, as the only child of the piano teacher and schoolteacher Alexander Kroll, born in New York City as the fourth child of White Russian Jewish immigrants, and the elementary school teacher Sarah Kroll, née Mahler, born in Warsaw. At the age of eleven, he began to compose a cycle of 30 piano pieces in all tonalities, including the enharmonic relationships, to explore the potentials of each tonality to express different emotions. He called them “Episodes,” in order to distinguish them from Chopin’s “Préludes.” Although of uneven quality, they represent a quarry of thematic material (partially with Russian Jewish flavor) from which Kroll was later to draw in his magnum opus, his four-act opera The Scarlet Letter. He had written but five of the “Episodes” when, shortly after his twelfth birthday, he composed his Piano Sonata in B Minor which, albeit still brief, is a harbinger of his later ability to create in large forms. His Symphony in G Minor, written from 1957 to 1959, has a performance duration of about half a