Ingolf Dahl - Personal Life

Personal Life

From his teenage years, Dahl was initially bi-sexual, but from then on "his preference and partiality...remained with men." He kept this secret in his professional life, even as he cataloged in his diaries a wide variety of infatuations, affairs, trysts, and relationships. After coming to America, Dahl married Etta Gornick Linick, whom he had met in Zurich. She accepted his homosexuality, helped him to keep it hidden, and shared his affection with a lover Dahl met on a trip to Boston and occasionally visited there. He maintained an intimate, though never exclusive, relationship for the last fifteen years of his life with Bill Colvig, whom he met on a Sierra Club hiking trip.

Notations in his manuscripts show he sometimes found inspiration in his male companions for his compositions. Hymn (1947) was inspired by Dahl's year-long affair with an art student he met at U.S.C. and movements of A Cycle of Sonnets (1967) carry the initials of two others.

His step-son only learned of his homosexuality in a letter of condolence he received upon Dahl's death. He assessed the relationship between Dahl's private and public sides in these words:

His social life and his compositions never seemed to acquire that ease of communication that sustain many gifted creators, those titans whose ability to tap into the well-springs of their being allow them to produce a copious and enviable body of artistic endeavor. Ingolf labored under levels of repression that were antithetical to such a process. He did not choose to be who he was, nor did he choose to make his true self available to the wider world. He lived and died without the luxury of candor.