Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland by Árni Heimir Ingólfsson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland by Árni Heimir Ingólfsson Frederick Key Smith Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland. By Árni Heimir Ingólfsson. (Music, Nature, Place.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xi, 383 p. ISBN 9780253044044 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9780253044051 (paperback), $38; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, works list, bibliography, index. My first exposure to the music of Jón Leifs (1899–1968) occurred early in my graduate studies as an aspiring musicologist. Having been attracted to Norse mythology since childhood and becoming reacquainted with it during my undergraduate years, the interrelationship between myth and music seemed a natural direction for my musicological studies. Coincidentally, it was not one of Leifs’s myth-based works to which I was first exposed, but his monolithic tone poem Hekla, op. 52 (1961) on the disc Earquake: The Loudest Classical Music of All Time (Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Leif Segerstam, Ondine OND 824 [1997], CD). Though I initially considered the work a cacophonous oddity, it turned out to be an invaluable discovery. A few years later, during work on my doctoral dissertation on Leifs and related contact with the Icelandic Music Information Center, I had the privilege of engaging in several conversations with the Icelandic musicologist Árni Heimir Ingólfsson (b. 1973). At that time, Ingólfsson was working on what would become one of the first major biographies of Jón Leifs in Icelandic, Jón Leifs: Líf í tónum ([ Jón Leifs: A Life in Music] Reykjavik: Mál og Menning, 2009), which had been anticipated by music critic Alex Ross (New Yorker, 23 August 2004, 48–53, 55–59) and nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize (Íslensku bókmenntaverðlaunin) the year it appeared. Ten years later, Ingólfsson brings his notable scholarship on perhaps the most original composer of modern Nordic art music to the English-speaking world in Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland. As much a biography of Leifs’s complex life and personality as it is an analysis of the composer’s distinct musical voice and compositional output, Ingólfsson’s highly accessible work also provides historical insight into Iceland’s development from “virtually a ‘land without music’ ” (p. 9) to that of a significant contributor to Nordic musical heritage. Over the course of nine lengthy chapters and a brief epilogue, Ingólfsson paints the portrait of a tortured artist who struggled with both his identity and legacy in a rapidly changing Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. As is emphasized by the author, Leifs desired to be not only Iceland’s foremost composer but also a major influence on his country’s cultural and political development, despite living much of his career as an expatriate in Germany. Ingólfsson’s book describes in detail the many professional roles that Leifs played throughout his life, including that of composer, conductor, amateur ethnomusicologist, advocate for artists’ rights, and radio music director. First and foremost a nationalist, Leifs himself stated, “I stand or fall as an Icelander, I can only be understood as an Icelander, for I have always, as long as I remember, loved Iceland more than anything else in the world, almost more than my art or my family” (p. 34). As a Nordic composer, Leifs essentially parallels his more famous nationalist colleagues Edvard Grieg of Norway, Jean Sibelius of Finland, and Carl Nielsen of Denmark. But unlike each [End Page 67] of these composers, for whom romanticism was a compositional foundation, Leifs was a staunch modernist, though he did not completely disavow tradition. Indeed, as Ingólfsson makes clear on several occasions, Leifs was enamored with Ludwig van Beethoven, whose music he began learning as a teenager and who was “the only composer for whom he expressed unqualified affinity and admiration in his adult years” (p. 109). Aside from his orchestral Variazioni pastorale, op. 8 (1920–30) and a few cases of inspiration, however, Leifs’s music bears no discernable resemblance to that of Beethoven. It was instead the heroic character of Beethoven—specifically his life, music, and aesthetic principles—with...