Victor Urbancic

Dr. Victor Urbancic or Viktor Ernest Johann von Urbantschitsch (9 August 1903 – 4 April 1958) was an Austrian composer, conductor, teacher and music scholar from Vienna. During his twenty-year exile in Iceland, from 1938 until his death, he made significant contributions to Iceland’s musical culture. Biography Urbancic was born in Vienna and began his musical studies there, studying piano, and later composition with Joseph Marx and conducting with Clemens Krauss and others at the Vienna Conservatory of Music. He also completed a doctorate in musicology at the University of Vienna under Guido Adler, with a dissertation on sonata form in the works of Johannes Brahms. His early career was spent at the Stadttheater Mainz, and he had already obtained a position at the Conservatory there, which was led by his old friend and colleague Hans Gál, when the Nazis took power in 1933 and he was forced to leave Germany. Although Urbancic was born and raised in the Catholic faith, his wife, Melitta, came from a Jewish family. He eventually found a new job at the Graz Conservatory, where he was teacher and director of the opera studio, as well as lecturing in musicology at the University of Graz.