Overview

A fascinating story of how three musicians, who escaped the Nazis, inspired Iceland's modern classical music. In Iceland in the 1930s, classical music was only beginning to be seriously practiced, at the same time when musicians of Jewish heritage were fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria. Despite the country's strict immigration policy, three outstanding young musicians were allowed to settle there: Robert Abraham, Heinz Edelstein, and Victor Urbancic. Their influence on Iceland's music scene as conductors, instrumentalists, teachers, and scholars proved invaluable. In Music at World's End, the first in-depth study of the lives and careers of these three musicians, musicologist Árni Ingólfsson examines their formative years in Germany and Austria, their dramatic escapes from the Nazi regime, and their triumphs and frustrating setbacks in their new homeland, a country in which Jews were virtually unknown. This fascinating case study is a valuable addition to studies of musical exile during World War II and beyond.

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9798855800685

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Reviews

"""Music at World's End offers a wealth of new details and insight into the developments of Western art music across continental Europe and into Iceland in the twentieth century . . . [and positions] the story of Iceland's classical music development . . . alongside the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany and Austria (and beyond). . . . [It] offers many new perspectives and details about how foreign musicians essentially built the foundation for classical music [in Iceland] in the early mid-twentieth century. For readers interested in continental music history . . . this offers new ways of understanding how the rise of Nazism directly affected musical life in addition to the extreme personal ramifications for many European Jews and other targeted people."" — Kimberly Cannady, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, Victoria University of Wellington ""A pioneering work in exile music research."" — Albrecht Dümling, musica reanimata Society, Berlin"

Author Information

Árni Heimir Ingólfsson is an independent scholar, lecturer, and pianist. He is the author of several books, including Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland, and coeditor of Sounds Icelandic: Essays on Icelandic Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

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