Three Jewish musicians fleeing Nazi Europe arrived in Iceland in the 1930s carrying almost nothing but their instruments and their lives. They found a country of fewer than 30,000 people, corrugated-iron houses battered by high winds, and no concert hall, no real orchestra, no conservatory worth the name. What they built in the decades that followed became the foundation of Iceland's classical music scene — a story of refuge, resilience, and the human capacity to create beauty from displacement.
Robert Abraham, a pianist from Berlin, arrived in late 1935 at age 22. Victor Urbancic, a Viennese conductor, found a foothold in Iceland in 1938 after doors closed on him in Switzerland and the United States. Heinz Edelstein, a cellist and teacher from Freiburg, arrived somewhere in between with his wife and two sons. Today, as many as 100 descendants of these three men live in Iceland, according to Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, whose book "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.
The Doors That Closed
The three men were admitted because of luck, timing, and getting their cases in front of the right people. At least four other Jewish musicians, including composer Viktor Ullmann, who would later die in Auschwitz, 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. Icelandic immigration policies were very restrictive, similar to Denmark's policies before and during the war. Iceland was poor, faced economic hardship, and antisemitism also played a role.
"Iceland is small and isolated, and in a place like that, xenophobia takes root easily," Ingólfsson 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."
Urbancic was born in Vienna in 1903 and trained as a pianist, composer, and conductor at the Vienna Conservatory, working through theaters in Mainz and Graz. He was raised Catholic, but his wife, Melitta, came from a Jewish family, and under the Nazis that was enough to end his career. Abraham was born in Berlin in 1912, the son of musicologist Otto Abraham. He trained at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik before fleeing Germany in 1934, at age 22. 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. Edelstein's journey was different from the start, with a father bringing his family into exile rather than a young man traveling light.
The country needed what the musicians could offer. "Iceland was pushing toward full independence from Denmark, and we felt we needed our own institutions to be taken seriously as a nation," Ingólfsson said. "Musically, we still had a long way to go. … These three musicians arrived at exactly the right moment, despite the antisemitism."
Another factor may have eased their acceptance: by the time they reached Iceland, none of the three was a practicing Jew. Abraham had been raised Protestant by his Jewish parents and was no longer religious, according to Ingólfsson. Urbancic's wife was Jewish, but he wasn't. Edelstein had become an atheist. "That made them easier for Icelanders to accept," Ingólfsson said.
"In a way, it happened in a very Icelandic way," Ingólfsson said. "They were lucky; instead of an automatic no, their applications were forwarded on based on people who knew people." Tina Frühauf of the CUNY Graduate Center said Jewish identity across pre-Holocaust Europe was far from monolithic and that many emigres had biographies like the Iceland refugees'. "Before the Holocaust, Germany had an incredibly diverse Jewish religious landscape, and that diversity carried over into the migration itself," she said.
Building From Nothing
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 didn't have.
"They essentially created it," Ingólfsson said, 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.
Uncovering the Story
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. He 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."
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."
The story took so long to surface because "There's still a tendency to tell the stories of our own," Ingólfsson said. "Yes, these men did extraordinary work, but they were foreigners. Musicology is also a fairly new field in Iceland; there are only three or four musicologists in the whole country."
Recognition is arriving now. 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.
The Wider Pattern
Frühauf 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. 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. 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. 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."
Why This Matters:
The story of three Jewish refugees building Iceland's classical music scene from nothing reveals both the catastrophic human cost of displacement and the creative resilience that survival can demand. At least four other Jewish musicians, including Viktor Ullmann, who died in Auschwitz, were turned away from Iceland under restrictive immigration policies shaped by economic hardship and antisemitism. The three who made it through did so on luck, connections, and timing — not merit or need. Their success came at the price of uprooting their lives, abandoning their careers, and starting over in a country of 30,000 people with no concert hall and no conservatory. What they created — the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, the country's first staged opera, its choral tradition, its music schools — was built by men who had lost everything and were willing to do any work that needed doing. As eyewitnesses to the Nazi era pass away, stories like these are being recovered not only to honor the dead but to restore the artistic legacy of musicians whose work was nearly erased by geography, prejudice, and the randomness of survival. The goal, as scholars now say, isn't just to remember them as refugees. It's to bring them back into the canon as artists.