Music at World’s End
by Árni Heimir Ingólfsson
Published 2025
327 pages, paperback
ISBN: 9798855800692
SUNY Press
Have you ever paused to ask yourself how Iceland, a country whose entire population is roughly that of Leicester, now boasts a cadre of influential musicians of the calibre of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Víkingur Ólafsson, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Daníel Bjarnason, to name but a few? The puzzle only deepens when one reads, in the opening pages of this gripping and instructive book, that the first concert in Iceland to feature a full symphony orchestra was given as recently as 1926, by the visiting Hamburg Philharmonic.
Árni Heimir Ingólfsson goes on to supply a crucial part of the answer. In the 1930s, when classical music in Iceland was in its infancy, three young musicians fleeing the Third Reich were permitted to settle there: Victor Urbancic, a conductor, pianist and composer from Vienna, whose wife Melitta was Jewish; Heinz Edelstein, a Jewish cellist and teacher from Freiburg; and Robert Abraham, a Jewish conductor and pianist from Berlin who would in time become Róbert Abraham Ottósson. None of the three chose Iceland so much as arrived at it, after other doors had closed. Nor was the country eager to have them. Ingólfsson is rightly unsparing about the attitude of Hermann Jónasson’s government towards refugees, and he documents other musicians who sought or contemplated Icelandic work permits and got nowhere, among them Viktor Ullmann, murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. The fates the three escaped are never far from the page.
What they accomplished once ashore is remarkable in its range. Urbancic directed the choir of the Reykjavík Music Society and gave Icelanders their first hearings of Messiah and the St John Passion. Edelstein achieved acclaim both as a cellist and as a teacher, particularly of children, and his methods were highly influential. Abraham became a renowned choral and orchestral conductor and earned a doctorate with his study of the chants of the office of Saint Thorlak, Iceland’s patron saint, thereby becoming the country’s first musicologist. Between them, in other words, they supplied a small nation with an orchestral culture, a choral tradition, a system of musical education and a scholarly conscience.
It came at a price. All three were to die at their peak: Urbancic at 54; Edelstein at 57; Abraham at 61. In each case, it seems, the same two forces were at work: the trauma of their flight from the Nazis, never fully laid to rest, and the punishing workloads they shouldered in their adopted country.
Ingólfsson has done a magnificent job with this book. The research is formidable but lightly worn: the narrative moves with the pace of good biography, lucid where the material is tangled, humane throughout, and scrupulous in separating what can be documented from what must be surmised. The book began life as a trio of newspaper articles in 2001, and the Icelandic edition of 2024 was shortlisted for the Icelandic Literary Prize; it is easy to see why. SUNY Press has produced it handsomely, with a generous array of photographs that bring the three protagonists vividly before the reader.
For those of us absorbed by the development of western classical music and its performance history, this is a story to relish. But it carries a weight beyond the musicological. It would be hard to find in recent history a plainer demonstration of the cultural good that immigrants bring to the society that receives them: three men admitted grudgingly, by exception, who repaid the favour with the foundations for a national musical life. Goodness knows that is a lesson to be heeded today.
Dominic Hartley
