Born in Edinburgh, the son of David Croal, sub-editor of the Caledonian Mercury, Croal was following a fashion of the time by giving himself the foreign pseudonym of Carlo Zotti, Carlo being an anagram of Croal.  Now a long-forgotten composer, we are fortunate that he wrote a memoir entitled Living Memories of an Octogenarian, published in 1894.  He dedicated the book to the Members of the Edinburgh Society of Musicians and those of the Edinburgh Pen and Pencil Club.

His first “public” memory was, perched on his father’s shoulders at the age of five, watching the survivors of the Black Watch regiment returning from Waterloo as they marched up the Canongate, Edinburgh to their quarters in the Castle.  In 1823 he was apprenticed to the music publisher and piano teacher Alexander Robertson.  At the age of 16, he was in the Assembly Rooms after the Theatrical Fund dinner to hear Sir Walter Scott’s avowal that he was the sole author of the Waverley novels, “still a memory cherished above all others of a public nature”.  Two years later he visited Abbotsford and “on Sir Walter hearing me run over the keys of the piano, he requested that I would play some Scotch airs to him….”  In 1876 the ‘The Abbotsford Quadrille’ by Carlo Zotti was published.  Croal composed or arranged over a hundred works using the names Croal or Zotti very roughly in equal numbers.

His Memories include comments on numerous musicians who came to Edinburgh, the first remembered being Friedrich Kalkbrenner.  Others include J. B. Cramer, Moscheles, Paganini, Adelaide Kemble, John Braham, Liszt, Sigismond Thalberg, Heinrich Herz and the singers Madame Catalani, John Sinclair, John Wilson, John Templeton (a life-long friend) and Jenny Lind.

“By the death this week of Mr. GEORGE CROAL, probably the last link between Sir Walter Scott and the present generation has been severed. … Mr. Croal retained his faculties and a fair degree of health up to within a week of his death.” The Times, 14 June 1907.