My friend and sometime colleague Gery Bramall, who has died aged 103, was a musical and legal translator who served for a number of years as a Labour councillor in London.
I inherited Gery as my German translator when I joined the classical division of EMI Records (later EMI Classics) as literary editor in 1987; before that she had worked as classical co-ordinator at Decca Records and as a professional translator, into German and from German, French and Latin. In our 20-year collaboration, she furnished me with translations rather above the general muster, saved me from numerous howlers, and got me hooked on sushi.
The younger daughter of Helene and Viktor Bloch, Gery was born into a prosperous assimilated Jewish family in Vienna, where her father was a banker and art collector. As a student she saw Hitler speak (“mesmerising”) and encountered Hans Keller, the musical young man about town.
In March 1939, her family were fortunate to be able to emigrate to Britain under a negotiated safe conduct. During the second war, Gery volunteered in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the women’s branch of the British army). In the postwar years, she sang as a soprano in the London Philharmonic Choir, most memorably at Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s 1951 UK debut (the Mass of Life under Thomas Beecham).
