Robert Abraham arrived in Iceland in late 1935, a 22-year-old pianist from Berlin carrying almost nothing, into a country with fewer than 30,000 people, no concert hall, no real orchestra and no conservatory worth the name. The story of how three Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe helped build Iceland’s classical music scene is, on its face, a tale of survival and talent. It’s also a record of how states decide who gets in, who gets turned away, and who gets to make a life at all.
The Gate Was Never Neutral
According to Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, at least four other Jewish musicians, including composer Viktor Ullmann, applied for Icelandic work permits around the same time and were turned away under a government that had largely closed the door to Jewish immigration. Ingólfsson said Iceland’s immigration policies were very restrictive, similar to Denmark’s policies before and during the war. He pointed to poverty, economic hardship and antisemitism. “Iceland is small and isolated, and in a place like that, xenophobia takes root easily,” he said. “The country was struggling economically, which fed suspicion of foreigners, and there was a prime minister who, on his own authority, closed the country to Jews entirely.”
That’s the machinery in plain sight. A small state, a closed border, a prime minister acting on his own authority, and a handful of desperate musicians left to the mercy of paperwork and whoever happened to know whom. Ingólfsson said the three men were admitted because of luck, timing and getting their cases in front of the right people. “In a way, it happened in a very Icelandic way,” he said. “They were lucky; instead of an automatic no, their applications were forwarded on based on people who knew people.”
Abraham fled Germany in 1934 after training at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Denmark turned him down. In late 1935, he sailed for Iceland alone and was advised to settle first in the fishing town of Akureyri, in the north. Victor Urbancic, born in Vienna in 1903, trained as a pianist, composer and conductor at the Vienna Conservatory and worked through theaters in Mainz and Graz before Nazi rule shut down his career because his wife, Melitta, came from a Jewish family. After doors closed on him in Switzerland and the United States, an old classmate helped him find a foothold in Iceland in 1938. Heinz Edelstein arrived somewhere in between with his wife and two sons.
What the Refugees Built
What followed was a major transformation of Icelandic music. Urbancic became chief conductor of the Reykjavík Orchestra, which by 1950 had grown into the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. He led the country’s first performances of Bach’s “St. John Passion” and Mozart’s “Requiem,” and in 1951 its first staged opera, Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” He also taught piano and theory at the Reykjavík School of Music and played the organ in the city’s only Catholic church.
Abraham became a central figure in Icelandic choral music. He conducted the Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s first-ever concert in 1950, founded the Philharmonia Choral Society in 1959, earned a doctorate in musicology and eventually served as director of music for the Church of Iceland. Edelstein helped build the music schools and teaching pipelines that a country with no conservatory tradition simply did not have.
Ingólfsson said, “They essentially created it,” referring to Iceland’s classical music scene. “People often ask why a country this small punches so far above its weight musically. Part of it is training, but just as important is a willingness to do the work. These three men set their egos aside. They were multi-talented and willing to take on any role — training orchestras, building choirs, teaching children — not just performing or conducting.” He said the men were able to do that because their old lives had already been upended and they were starting over.
The book behind the story, “Music at World’s End: Three Refugee Musicians from Nazi Germany and Their Contribution to Iceland’s Music Life,” was published in English this year by SUNY Press after the Icelandic edition in 2024. Ingólfsson said he stumbled into the story about 25 years ago when an editor in Iceland approached him with the idea while he was in graduate school at Harvard. He published three newspaper profiles of the men in 2001, then set the project aside for two decades before turning it into a full book.
Paperwork, Exile and the Long Memory
The same state system that shut doors on some refugees happened to let these three through, but only after luck, connections and the right names in the right hands. Ingólfsson said he tracked down archives and people, got in touch with the musicians’ families and met each of their children. “It’s a small world, and one connection led to another. Having that access early on made all the difference,” he said.
While researching Abraham, Ingólfsson learned that the young musician had once been engaged to a non-Jewish woman who stayed behind in Berlin when he fled, and that he sent her care packages for years. Ingólfsson tracked down her daughter and wrote to her cold. “I’m writing a biography of your mother’s ex-boyfriend,” he told her. “She was overjoyed,” he recalled. “I met her in Hamburg, and she handed me a box of letters. That daughter became a second grandmother to me.”
Recognition is arriving late. Weeks ago, the Exile Museum in Berlin launched a series with foreign embassies, each spotlighting a refugee story tied to their country, and Iceland was chosen to go first. Tina Frühauf of the CUNY Graduate Center said smaller countries of exile are where overlooked figures are often found. “Because exiles were so widely dispersed, many remain unknown simply due to geography,” she said.
German musicologist Albrecht Dümling said his research took him to Australia, where nearly 100 German-Jewish refugee musicians landed, some after being deported there by the British, who considered them “enemy aliens.” He said of men sent aboard the prison ship Dunera in 1940, “They were horrified, as they had come as Jewish refugees to Britain and had hoped to be in a safe country,” and added, “They could not believe that in England they had been interned, and this was continued in Australia as well. Some were very depressed. But others saw their internment as a challenge to write songs that made clear their opposition to Hitler’s Germany.”
Dümling said what separated musicians who thrived from those who vanished often had less to do with talent than paperwork. Refugees in Iceland typically weren’t permitted to resume their old careers, a fate Urbancic, Edelstein and Abraham avoided only because Iceland’s need for musicians overrode the usual restrictions. All three scholars described urgency as eyewitnesses to the Nazi era pass away. “As eyewitnesses to the Nazi era pass away, hopes are pinned on the second generation,” Dümling said, “but the publication of personal memoirs, letters, and diaries written by these eyewitnesses is also taking on greater significance.” Frühauf said, “We have to avoid reducing these artists to simply victims or survivors, and instead make sure their music is valued on its own artistic merit,” adding, “The goal isn’t only to recover lost works, it’s to bring these musicians back into the canon.”
For Ingólfsson, the project became “something closer to a rescue than a research assignment.” He said, “What strikes me most is the sheer randomness of it, how much depended on one person knowing another, often in events far outside Iceland,” and added, “These men were growing desperate in the 1930s, trying everything to get out. For a classical musician, Iceland was hardly a dream destination. And yet they turned something depressing and unfortunate into something extraordinary. It’s a very Icelandic story.”