Jórunn Viðar

Jórunn Viðar (7 December 1918 – 27 February 2017) was an Icelandic pianist and composer. She was the first classically trained female composer in Iceland and her music is frequently inspired by Icelandic folk songs and folklore. Biography Jórunn Viðar was born and grew up in Reykjavík, Iceland. In 1937 she graduated from Reykjavík Grammar School, and the same year travelled to Germany to study piano for two years at the Music Academy in Berlin. She returned to Iceland and married Lárus Fjeldsted (1918–1985), and began to study composition with Victor Urbancic, an Austrian musician who was living in exile in Reykjavík. In 1943, Jórunn’s husband was diagnosed with acute lymphoma and was treated with radiation at a hospital in Baltimore. Once he had recovered, Jórunn joined him in New York City where they lived until December 1945. There, she studied composition with Vittorio Giannini at the Juilliard School of Music and took private piano lessons with the Polish pianist and pedagogue Helena Morsztyn. In 1943–1945 Jórunn worked on an opera in collaboration with her younger sister, the writer and artist Drífa Viðar. Titled Snær konungur (King Snow), it drew on old Icelandic mythology a