30 Facts About Ingolf Dahl

Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator.

Ingolf Dahl had two brothers, Gert Marcus, and Holger, and one sister, Anna-Britta.

In Hamburg, Dahl studied piano under Edith Weiss-Mann, a harpsichordist, pianist, and a proponent of early music.

Ingolf Dahl studied with Philipp Jarnach at the Hochschule fur Musik Koln.

Ingolf Dahl served as a vocal coach and chorus master for the world premieres of Alban Berg's Lulu and Paul Hindemith's Mathis der Maler.

Ingolf Dahl consistently lied about his background, claiming to be of Swedish birth and denying his Jewish heritage.

Ingolf Dahl claimed to have emigrated a year earlier than he actually had.

Ingolf Dahl settled in Los Angeles and joined the community of expatriate musicians that included Ernst Krenek, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Ernst Toch.

Ingolf Dahl had a varied musical career as a solo pianist, keyboard performer, accompanist, conductor, coach, composer, and critic.

Ingolf Dahl 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.

Ingolf Dahl 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.

Ingolf Dahl 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.

Ingolf Dahl gave private lessons in the classical repertoire to Benny Goodman as well.

Ingolf Dahl performed on keyboard instruments in the soundtrack orchestras for many films at Fox, Goldwyn Studios, Columbia, Universal, MGM, and Warner Bros.

Ingolf Dahl worked on the television show The Twilight Zone.

Ingolf Dahl conducted the soundtrack to The Abductors by his pupil Paul Glass and performed both second and third movements of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata in the 1969 animated film A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

Ingolf Dahl later completed commissions for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Koussevitzky and Fromm foundations.

In 1999, one critic reviewing a recording of Ingolf Dahl's works called him a "spiffy composer", "a cross between Stravinsky and Hindemith".

Ingolf Dahl legally changed his name to Ingolf Dahl in February 1943 and became a naturalized US citizen in September of that year.

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

Ingolf Dahl had his first homosexual experiences at the age of 16 with the painter Eduard Bargheer.

Ingolf Dahl accepted his homosexuality, helped him to keep it hidden, and shared his affection with a lover that Dahl had met on a trip to Boston, and occasionally visited there.

Ingolf Dahl 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.

Ingolf Dahl assessed the relationship between Dahl's private and public sides in these words:.

Ingolf Dahl labored under levels of repression that were antithetical to such a process.

Ingolf Dahl did not choose to be who he was, nor did he choose to make his true self available to the wider world.

Ingolf Dahl lived and died without the luxury of candor.

Ingolf Dahl's music has been recorded on the Boston Records, Capstone, Centaur, Chandos Records, CRI, Crystal, Klavier Music Productions, MKH Medien Kontor Hamburg, Nimbus, and Summit labels.

Ingolf Dahl kept a diary in annual volumes from 1928 until his death in 1970.

In 2012 his stepson, Anthony Linick, who wrote an extensive biography of Ingolf Dahl, donated these to USC.