choose another major, and he opted for German Literature – with the intention of teaching German to voice students later on and thus entering the world of music through the back door, so to speak. 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. In German Literature from the University of Rochester in 1965. Partly as a result of the Metropolitan Opera's rejection of “The Scarlet Letter,” Kroll switched from composing operas to composing lieder, for the time being. His first collection, “Lieder aus der Einsamkeit” (1965–66), is a kind of by-product of “The Scarlet Letter” and attempts to fuse the genre of the lied with operatic elements. 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. Kroll earned his Artium Magister (Master of Arts degree) at Yale University in 1967. 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. In the summer of 1969 he received a Fellowship from the University of Würzburg and welcomed the opportunity to return to Germany – where he had already spent his Junior Year Abroad in 1963–64, while still composing “The Scarlet Letter” - to be the first person from outside the intimate circle of the Mann family to study Klaus Mann's unpublished manuscripts - about half of which are in English - near Zurich in April, 1970. He started writing his dissertation in the fall of that year and was awarded his Ph.D. by the University of Rochester in 1973. During this time, he still struggled to compose lieder whenever possible. 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. A stint as a commercial translator in Kirchzarten near Freiburg