Will Meisel

Vocation

Family

German composer who wrote more than fifty film scores during his career. He also wrote several operettas including A Friend So Lovely as You (1930) (Eine Freundin so goldig wie du). Meisel's parents were the ballet master Emil Meisel and his wife Olga Meisel (nee Loepke). From the age of ten he was a dancer at the then Royal Court Opera in Berlin, Unter den Linden. From March 1915 to November 1918 Meisel served as a soldier in the First World War. Wounded in 1917 in Ypres he had to recuperate from gas poisoning in the military hospital. After the war he was a dancer again at the Staatsoper Berlin from 1918 to 1923. On 15 May 1926, he founded Edition Meisel & Co, a publishing company. After the "seizure of power" of the National Socialists (Nazis), he became a member of the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933. As a result, he worked as a composer of film music and operettas, but also of Nazi propaganda pieces. In 1937 he "took over" the fully furnished summer house of the Jewish physician Alfred Alexander who had been expelled from Germany. Will Meisel died on 29 April 1967, aged 69, in Müllheim, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany. Link to Wikipedia biography