Coda
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Kritz was born in 1925, the youngest of six children of a Chicago cantor. He began piano lessons at age 6, went on to the bass fiddle and cello, and at 11 started to study composition with Paul Held at the American Conservatory. He graduated from Senn High School at 16 and enrolled at Northwestern University as a music major. A year later, with the country at war, he dropped out to enlist in the marines and was sent to the Pacific. When he returned three years later he went to University of Wisconsin, attracted by the Pro Arte Quartet. He stayed at Wisconsin for a year, playing bass with a jazz combo for spending money and composing music influenced by Bartok and Ravel. Then he returned to Chicago to study with theorist Oswald Jonas at Roosevelt University and to marry Dorothy Labinger, a silver-voiced soprano.
During his years as a businessman Kritz would occasionally pull out his music, wishing he could hear it played, wondering if it had been any good. In 1995, at the urging of his companion, Georgeanna Fischetti, he made a cold call to the music department at Northwestern, got an appointment with associate dean Richard Green, and took in one of his old scores. “I was nervous,” Kritz says. “I expected them to laugh me out of the office.” Instead Green was polite, “and then he started humming a little to himself. He said, ‘I’d like to discuss this with the head of the theory department and we’ll call you back.’” When they did, Kritz was amazed: they wanted his permission to do a “reading” of the piece, and after that they wanted to set up a master class to work on it. “For four months they played my quintet in rehearsal and then they gave two performances as part of the music school’s chamber music festival,” Kritz says. “That was November ’95. [The performance] happened on my 70th birthday.”
