Ingolf Dahl - Biography

Biography

Born in Hamburg, Germany to a German father and a Swedish mother, his birth name was Walter Ingolf Marcus. He studied with Philipp Jarnach at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (1930–32). Leaving Germany where the Nazi Party was coming to power, he continued his studies at the University of Zürich with Volkmar Andreae and Walter Frey. Living with relatives and working at the Zurich Opera for more than six years, he rose from an internship to the rank of assistant conductor. He served as a vocal coach and chorus master for the world premieres of Alban Berg's Lulu and Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler.

After Switzerland became hostile to Jewish refugees and his role at the Opera was restricted to playing in the orchestra, Dahl emigrated to the United States in 1939. There he used the name Ingolf Dahl, based on his original middle name and his mother's maiden name. He consistently lied about his background, claiming to be of Swedish birth and denying his Jewish heritage. He claimed to have emigrated a year earlier than he actually had. He settled in Los Angeles and joined the community of expatriate musicians that included Ernst Krenek, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Ernst Toch. He had a varied musical career as a solo pianist, keyboard performer (piano and harpsichord), accompanist, conductor, coach, composer, and critic. He produced a performing translation of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in English and translated, either alone or with a collaborator, such works as Stravinsky's Poetics of Music. He performed many of Stravinsky's works and the composer was impressed enough to contract Dahl to create a two-piano version of his Danses concertantes and program notes for other works. In 1947, with Joseph Szigeti he produced a reconstruction of Bach's Violin Concerto in D Minor.

He also worked in the entertainment industry, touring as pianist to Edgar Bergen and his puppets in 1941 and later for comedian Gracie Fields in 1942 and 1956. He produced musical arrangements for Tommy Dorsey and served as arranger/conductor to Victor Borge. He gave private lessons in the classical repertoire to Benny Goodman as well. He performed on keyboard instruments in the soundtrack orchestras for many films at Fox, Goldwyn Studios, Columbia, Universal, MGM, and Warner Bros., as well as the post-production company Todd-AO. He also worked on the television show The Twilight Zone. Though grateful for the income this work provided, he complained while working on Spartacus how pointless it was "to tinkle a few notes on the celeste" when the notes are also doubled by several other instruments, all for a passage presented to the audience under sound effects and actors' voices. Dahl conducted the soundtrack to The Abductors (1957) by his pupil Paul Glass and performed the second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata in the 1969 animated film A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

Among his compositions, the most frequently performed is the Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Orchestra commissioned and premiered by Sigurd Raschèr in 1949. He later completed commissions for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Koussevitsky and Fromm foundations. His final work, complete and partly orchestrated at his death in 1970, was the Elegy Concerto for violin and chamber orchestra. In 1999, one critic reviewing a recording of Dahl's works called him a "spiffy composer," "a cross between Stravinsky and Hindemith."

He legally changed his name to Ingolf Dahl in February 1943 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in September of that year. In 1945 he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he taught for the rest of his life. In 1952 he was appointed the first head of the Tanglewood Study Group, a program that targeted not professionals but "the intelligent amateur and music enthusiast, also the general music student and music educator." His most prominent students included the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and composer David Cope.

Among Dahl's honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition in 1951, two Huntington Hartford Fellowships, an Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Southern California, the ASCAP Stravinsky Award, and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954.

He died in Frutigen, Switzerland on August 6, 1970, just a few weeks after the death of his wife on June 10.