Victor Urbancic

Victor Urbancic (born August 9, 1903 in Vienna , † April 4, 1958 in Reykjavík ) was an Austrian composer, conductor, teacher and musicologist who worked in Iceland .

Life

Urbancic (Urbantschitsch) worked at the Stadttheater Mainz as a solo repetitor and operetta conductor from 1926 , and as opera conductor from 1930. After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he was fired for racist and political reasons. From 1934 he worked at the conservatory in Graz . After the annexation of Austria , Urbancic and his wife from a Jewish family, Melitta b. Grünbaum, to Iceland with her three children . One of his fellow students, Franz Mixa, himself an educated musician from Austria , sometimes exchanged positions with him. Urbancic spent the second half of his life in Iceland and at that time had an immense influence on the local music and its development.

Before he had to flee to Iceland, he was u. a. Vice Director of the Conservatory in Graz and Director of the Musicological Institute of the University of Graz . In the last years of his life he was musical director of the National Theater in Reykjavík . In 1951, he conducted the first opera to be performed in Iceland, Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi . One of his many activities was that of the organist and choirmaster of Landakotskirkja in Reykjavík. Urbancic received the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcons . He died on Good Friday 1958.

literature

• Hannes Heer ; Sven Fritz; Heike Brummer; Jutta Zwilling: Silent voices: the expulsion of the “Jews” and “politically intolerable” from the Hessian theaters 1933 to 1945. Berlin: Metropol, 2011 ISBN 978-3-86331-013-4 .

swell

1. ↑ Rudolf Habringer : Emigration to the edge of the world. The story of the musician Victor Urbancic. In: Theodor Kramer Society (ed.): Zwischenwelt. Literature, Resistance, Exil , Vol. 20 (2003), Heft 2, pp. 33-41, ISSN  1606-4321
2. ↑ Rudolf Habringer:  Victor Urbancic in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era (LexM)