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 studies. Asriel took over the leadership of the London FDJ choir and made friends among its members. As Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music (L.R.A.M.), he continued his studies from 1941 with Franz Osborn (piano) and Ernst Hermann Meyer (composition).
His gratitude to the FDJ led Asriel to destroyed Germany in 1946 to help build socialism there. In 1946 he continued his music studies, which had been interrupted in exile, at the Hochschule für Musik in the western part of Berlin with Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling and Hermann Wunsch (composition) and Richard Rössler (piano). This was followed by the state examination in piano in 1948. From 1950 to 1951, Andre Asriel was a master student at the Deutsche Akademie der Künste (East Berlin) with Hanns Eisler. From 1950 to 1967, he was a lecturer and then professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" (DDR). He retired in 1980.
Asriel became known above all for his political songs. But film music was also an important field of activity for him. He wrote the music for more than 30 films. Furthermore, he composed chansons, ballads, chamber, vocal and instrumental music. Many of his compositions were influenced by jazz music.
He was married to the Germanist Gertrud (Katja) Asriel from 1951 and had two children.
In 1951, Asriel was awarded the National Prize of the GDR, in 1970 the , and in 1974 and 1982 the Patriotic Order of Merit.