Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler

[jserraglio]

Hands down, in both content and style, the most musical book about music I have read in some time.

Library Journal (2023-07-14):
In this profoundly moving book, the Boston Globe's chief classical music critic Eichler examines how four modernists coped with the trauma of World War II and the Holocaust by composing transcendent pieces of music: Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen, Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13 (Babi Yar), and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. The book starts in 1827, when German poet Goethe sat under an oak tree in Ettersberg and ate a sumptuous breakfast, while enthusing on the goodness of life. In 1937, the forest was cleared away to build the Buchenwald concentration camp. A beech remained inside but now in a world of horror. The author also recounts listening to a 1929 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto for Two Violins, played by father and daughter Arnold and Alma Rose. Alma died in Auschwitz in 1944, and her father, a broken man, lived until 1946. This book is about how music bears witness to history, crosses time, and has the power to heal divided souls. It can connect people across ages in ways other memorials can't. VERDICT An absorbing read for serious music lovers that may well become a classic in music criticism.--David Keymer

Publishers Weekly (2023-06-26):
Boston Globe music critic Eichler contends in his masterful debut that the classical compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Richard Strauss "possess a unique and often underappreciated power" to connect us to the "shocking and unassimilable past" of the Holocaust. Expertly detailing each composer's life and career, particularly their wartime experiences, Eichler argues that "like a relay station from the past," their music "carries forward an essential memory of the... Shoah"; he doesn't just approach the music on its "own terms," but as a direct "encounter" with history. Having fled Nazi Germany for America in 1933, Schoenberg "assume the sacred task of memorializing the unfathomable loss" in his powerful 1947 composition A Survivor from Warsaw. Eichler, drawing on Schoenberg's notes and biography, determines that this cantata is not only a memorial for murdered people but a lament for the dead dream of a shared German-Jewish culture. Decades later, British pacifist Britten composed his 1962 War Requiem, which draws on the WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen to challenge the idea that there is any nobility in war; Eichler traces how this displacement of WWI history onto WWII is an echo of Britain's initial postwar attempts to minimize the Holocaust. In vivid, luminous prose, Eichler makes clear that to actively listen to these compositions is "to perform an act of empathy angled toward the past" and reveal latent emotions at their moment of creation. It's a moving declaration of the power of music to transmit human feeling across time. (Aug.)