Fredric Joseph Kroll (born February 7, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American-German composer and writer. He was born in 1945 as the only child of the piano teacher and schoolteacher Alexander Kroll, born in New York 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 an hour. Kroll's further juvenilia include numerous piano pieces and a Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor (1958). 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. 1960 was a pivotal year for Fredric Kroll. In February, he read Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel “The Scarlet Letter” as required reading at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, and immediately set about composing the original version of the Prelude (radically rewritten in 1962, except for the beginning and the conclusion). On August 9, he discovered Klaus Mann's novel “Pathetic Symphony” about Tchaikovsky, and bought, on the same day, his first recordings of works by Gustav Mahler. Having already studied orchestral scores by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Brahms, he began, in 1960, to learn the actual technique of composition by playing through the piano-vocal scores of Puccini, Verdi, Alfredo Catalani, Tchaikovsky, and Vittorio Giannini's operatic setting of “The Scarlet Letter” from 1938. Kroll was rejected by the Eastman School of Music at the beginning of 1961 because he played neither oboe nor piano sufficiently well to meet the requirements for admission. The University of Rochester urged him to