Three Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe arrived in Iceland in the 1930s and built the country's classical music infrastructure from the ground up, transforming a fishing port with no concert hall, no real orchestra and no conservatory into a nation that today punches far above its weight musically. Robert Abraham, a pianist from Berlin; Victor Urbancic, a Viennese conductor; and Heinz Edelstein, a cellist and teacher from Freiburg, were admitted at a time when Iceland had largely closed its doors to Jewish immigration — a policy similar to Denmark's before and during the war. Their success wasn't guaranteed. It was the product of luck, timing, connections and the country's urgent need for what they could offer.
According to a newly translated book by Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, "Music at World's End: Three Refugee Musicians from Nazi Germany and Their Contribution to Iceland's Music Life," published in English this year by SUNY Press after the Icelandic edition in 2024, the three men arrived in a country of fewer than 30,000 people. Iceland in the autumn of 1935 was a small fishing port of corrugated-iron houses battered by high winds, cod trawlers idling in the harbor, and geothermal steam curling up from hot springs that would one day heat the whole city. Abraham stepped into that setting in late 1935, at age 22, carrying almost nothing with him and hoping no one would ask too many questions about why he'd left Germany. Urbancic arrived in 1938 with his Jewish wife, Melitta, after years of trying and failing to find a safe harbor elsewhere in Europe. Edelstein arrived somewhere in between with his wife and two sons.
Why They Got In
Ingólfsson said 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. "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."
But 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.
The three were admitted based on luck and connections. "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.
What They 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 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. Today, there are as many as 100 descendants of these three men living in Iceland, according to Ingólfsson.
The Research Journey
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."
Ingólfsson said the story took so long to surface because "There's still a tendency to tell the stories of our own," adding, "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 Broader Picture
Tina 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," 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."
Why This Matters:
The story of these three musicians illustrates how individual initiative and institutional need can overcome even restrictive immigration policies when there's a clear national benefit. Iceland's decision to admit Abraham, Urbancic and Edelstein — despite broader antisemitism and closed borders — was driven by the country's push toward independence and its recognition that it lacked the cultural infrastructure of a serious nation. The musicians didn't just perform; they built institutions from scratch, trained generations of students and created a classical music tradition that continues to this day. Their success wasn't about victimhood or charity — it was about competence, hard work and a willingness to do whatever was needed. The fact that their story took decades to surface reflects a broader challenge: recognizing the contributions of immigrants and refugees not as acts of national generosity but as strategic investments that often pay dividends far beyond what anyone expected. As eyewitnesses to the Nazi era pass away, recovering these stories becomes both a historical and a cultural imperative — not to canonize suffering, but to understand how excellence travels and takes root in unexpected places.