Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland

Árni Heimir Ingólfsson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253044068
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland, Árni Heimir Ingólfsson provides a striking account of the dramatic career of Iceland's iconic composer. Leifs (1899–1968) was the first Icelander to devote himself fully to composition at a time when a local music scene was only beginning to take form. He was a fervent nationalist in his art, fashioning an idiosyncratic and uncompromising 'Icelandic' sound from traditions of vernacular music with the aim to legitimize Iceland as an independent, culturally empowered nation.

In addition to exploring Leifs's career, Ingólfsson provides detailed descriptions of Leifs's major works and their cultural contexts. Leifs's music was inspired by the Icelandic landscape and includes auditory depictions of volcanos, geysers, and waterfalls. The raw quality of his orchestral music is frequently enhanced by an expansive percussion section, including anvils, stones, sirens, bells, ships' chains, shotguns, and cannons.

Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Leifs's music has been rediscovered in recent years and hailed as a singular and deeply original contribution to twentieth-century music. Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland enriches our understanding and appreciation of Leifs and his music by exploring the political, literary and environmental contexts that influenced his work.

ONE

THE LAND WITHOUT MUSIC (1899–1916)

WHEN JÓN ÞORLEIFSSON (WHO LATER took the surname Leifs) was born at Sólheimar farm in northwestern Iceland in 1899, Iceland was virtually a “land without music.”¹ This island of roughly forty thousand square miles had for centuries been among the most economically deprived regions of Europe. Its economy was largely dependent on farming, a risky endeavor in a country with infertile soil and a volatile climate; the majority of its population of roughly seventy thousand still lived in houses made of turf. Brutal weather conditions, a volcanic eruption, and an increase in population led to a massive emigration of Icelanders between 1860 and 1914, when an estimated quarter of the total population chose to start a new life in Canada, the United States, and Brazil.

The musical scene in nineteenth-century Iceland was equally humble. It consisted largely of folk songs, unaccompanied hymn singing in church, and performance on a single type of indigenous instrument, a bowed zither known as a langspil (similar to the Norwegian langeleik). But while musical activity in Iceland was at a low point in the nineteenth century, sources suggest that it had been more vibrant at earlier stages in its history. During the Roman Catholic era (1000–1550), nine monasteries and nunneries existed in Iceland, and, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, these were centers of culture and learning. Gregorian chant and simple polyphony were sung at mass and office, including a liturgy for Þorlákur, Iceland’s patron saint, which survives in a manuscript from around 1400.² After the Lutheran Reformation (completed with the beheading of the last Catholic bishop in 1550), church authorities published hymnals in which the new liturgy, largely derived from Danish and German sources, was adapted to local use. Domestic singing seems also to have been widespread, judging from the considerable number of manuscript songbooks surviving from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of these demonstrate a surprisingly active transmission of both sacred and secular polyphony from distant shores. One Icelandic songbook from the 1660s contains local contrafacta—new lyrics to preexisting music—to a medieval pilgrim song from the Catalan manuscript Llibre vermell, a well-known French chanson spirituelle first published in 1548, a lighthearted canzonetta by the sixteenth-century Florentine composer Francesco Corteccia, and secular songs by the Swiss and Austrian composers Ludwig Senfl and Paul Hofhaimer.³ Such imported polyphony was in all likelihood mostly cultivated at the country’s two Latin schools—at Skálholt in southern Iceland and at Hólar in the north. Each school housed roughly twenty students, and music was part of the curriculum, although the precise nature and quality of the instruction seem to have varied over time.⁴

By the early 1800s, this eclectic type of music making had all but evaporated. Violent volcanic eruptions in 1784–85, along with a destructive earthquake in southern Iceland, signaled the end of the Latin schools in their age-old form. When a new school was established in Reykjavík a few years later, music was no longer part of the curriculum. The consequences of such neglect were quickly felt, for in the ensuing decades only a handful of figures among the cultural elite acquired any proficiency in music. When the pioneer of the Icelandic enlightenment, Magnús Stephensen, died in 1830, an organ formerly in his possession was shipped back to Copenhagen, as no one on the island knew how to play it.⁵

A decade later, Pétur Guðjohnsen, the first Icelander to have formally studied church music in Denmark, returned to Reykjavík and was promptly rewarded with an appointment as cathedral organist. Gradually, a fledgling music scene began to take shape. Most of the activity centered on church music and choral singing; a new hymnal appeared in print in 1861, and a men’s chorus was founded the following year. A leading advocate of progress was Olufa Finsen, the wife of the Danish governor, who resided in Reykjavík between 1865 and 1882. She taught piano and singing, formed a small choir that rehearsed twice weekly at her home, and in 1880 conducted her own cantata for voices and organ at the funeral of Icelandic nationalist hero Jón Sigurðsson.⁶

Songs with simple piano accompaniment were a staple of the burgeoning household music making, and a handful of local composers—all amateurs with limited musical training—achieved considerable popularity in this field in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Jónas Helgason was a blacksmith who later developed a career in music and was an influential teacher; Árni Thorsteinson was a photographer; Bjarni Þorsteinsson was a priest. A more experienced musician was Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson (1847–1927), who studied music with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig and lived in Edinburgh for most of his career. His works are well crafted, with echoes of Mendelssohn, Grieg, and Niels Gade, but Sveinbjörnsson remained largely unaffected by nationalist spirit. His output includes the first Icelandic works of chamber music (two piano trios and a violin sonata) as well as the choral hymn “Ó, Guð vors lands” (“O, God of Our Country”).

This piece, which later became the national anthem, was composed for an event that greatly stimulated the development of the local music scene. In 1874, to mark the one-thousand-year anniversary of the Norwegian settlement, Iceland celebrated with a national festival. King Christian IX of Denmark was among the guests and presented Icelanders with their first constitution, granting the parliamentary Alþingi legislative power with the crown in matters of exclusively Icelandic concern. This was a milestone in Iceland’s claim for independence from Denmark, the main topic of political discussion in the last decades of the nineteenth century. When Norwegians had settled in Iceland in the 870s, they had founded a free country, but decades of civil unrest in the early thirteenth century had led the country to the brink of collapse, and Iceland lost its independence to Norway in 1262. Royal succession eventually brought Norway under Danish rule, and by the nineteenth century, Iceland was little more than a Danish colony, with no local representation within the Danish government.⁷

In the years following the 1874 festival, Icelanders were buoyed by a new optimism, which led to a revitalization of society and the urge to create a better and more advanced life for the Icelandic people. This was also true of music, which, like other art forms, plays a crucial role in the formation of a national identity. The development of Iceland’s musical infrastructure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was directly related to the burgeoning nationalist movement. The Reykjavík Brass Society (Lúðurþeytarafélag Reykjavíkur) performed for the first time in 1876, the first public concert by a mixed choir was given in 1883, and a program for improving church music by installing small harmoniums in rural churches was adopted throughout the country between 1874 and the 1890s.⁸ But progress was slow; catching up with centuries of continental developments would not be achieved overnight. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, music in Reykjavík consisted mostly of the cathedral choir leading hymn singing during worship, occasional song recitals or choral concerts, and a few local ensembles that performed salon music in the town’s cafés. Satisfactory instruments were scarce; as late as 1914, a critic lamented that a visiting pianist had no choice but to perform his recital—which included Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata—on an upright piano.⁹

FROM COUNTRYSIDE TO VILLAGE

While Jón Þorleifsson (later Leifs) was not born in the capital, his parents moved from the countryside to Reykjavík in 1900, when he was just over one year old. Iceland was still a rural society of farmers and fishermen; out of a total of seventy-eight thousand inhabitants, only five thousand lived in the capital.¹⁰ Leifs’s parents had been raised in the countryside, and both came from relatively well-to-do families. His father, Þorleifur Jónsson (1855–1929), had been born at the farm Sólheimar (“Sun-worlds”) in the northern county of Húnavatnssýsla, the son of a prosperous farmer who had served as a member of parliament. After graduating from the Reykjavík Latin school in 1881, Þorleifur departed for Copenhagen, where he commenced studies in law at the university. His time there was cut short by a dangerous infection, for which he was hospitalized for nearly a year, often in serious condition, before returning to Iceland, where he spent another year convalescing at his parents’ farm. In 1886, having regained full strength, he began his career in earnest. He purchased a weekly Reykjavík journal called Þjóðólfur, which he managed and edited for six years, and he also became an elected member of the Icelandic parliament, following in his father’s footsteps. In his aspirations as both journal editor and parliamentarian, he was a staunch supporter of the burgeoning revivalist movement that sought national emancipation and dreamed of a better, more enlightened, and more prosperous society. For a while, he enjoyed the strong backing of his constituents, who admired, in the words of a friend, his “rare conscientiousness” in working “for the benefit of the nation and its people.”¹¹

Þorleifur was a confirmed bachelor until September 1893, when, at age thirty-eight, he married the twenty-year-old Ragnheiður Bjarnadóttir. She had been born and raised at Reykhólar, an ancient farm site in northwestern Iceland, whose name (“Smoke Hills”) refers to the nearby hot springs used for washing clothes and occasionally for cooking. Her parents, Bjarni Þórðarson and Þórey Pálsdóttir, had no fewer than thirteen children and hired a schoolteacher from Reykjavík each winter to ensure the best education available for all of them. At age eighteen, Ragnheiður continued her studies in Copenhagen, and the following year she received her first job, teaching Danish and needlework at an all-girls school in northern Iceland. Her career was truncated by what seems to have been a hastily arranged wedding to Þorleifur Jónsson; their first child, a son named Bjarni, was born after only seven months of marriage. During their first year of matrimony, the couple lived with Ragnheiður’s parents at Reykhólar. Later, they farmed for a while on land owned by Þorleifur’s family farther east, in Húnavatnssýsla, before relocating yet again to another nearby farm. Their letters suggest that they had their doubts about whether they were cut out for the farming life, not least because Þorleifur’s frequent absence during parliament sessions in Reykjavík put a strain on the running of the household.¹²

Figure 1.1. Ragnheiður Bjarnadóttir and Þorleifur Jónsson in Reykjavík, ca. 1900. © Leifs Archives, National and University Library of Iceland.

After thirteen successful years, Þorleifur’s career as a parliamentarian came to an abrupt end when he took a contested standpoint on a heated political topic. While Iceland’s bid for independence from Denmark had gained considerable momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, the post of minister of Iceland was still occupied by a Danish government official. Many Icelanders wanted to press for the establishment of a local minister’s post in Reykjavík, but others believed that the Danes might be more easily swayed if the native minister were to be based in Copenhagen. This more cautious plan was known as Valtýska, after its leading advocate, Valtýr Guðmundsson, professor at Copenhagen University and Þorleifur’s former classmate. In the end, the home rule framework prevailed, and Iceland received its first home minister in 1904. Þorleifur’s support for the alternative Valtýska movement caused a falling out wi...