In this haunting book, Jeremy Eichler combines his unique expertise as a celebrated music critic for the Boston Globe and as a historian of modern Europe to recount the story of four 20^th century composers and how each one responded to the horror and barbarity that they lived through during their long careers. At first glance, there does not appear to be a natural bond connecting Arnold Schonberg, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and Dimitri Shostakovich, although their lives overlapped, and their paths intersected. Strauss helped Schonberg get started early in his career when he moved to Berlin in 1901. Britten and Shostakovich established a deep and abiding relationship later in life and they enthusiastically championed each other’s work. But the four men had different pedigrees, upbringing, and life experiences. What Eichler sees as the common link is the creative need to express painful memories in music.  At a deeper level, that memory always involved the persecution of Jews and the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust.

Strauss and Schonberg were products of high German culture and were inspired by the notion of bildung, that man’s perfection is achievable by embracing the humanistic arts. Of all the elements of culture – visual arts, literature, sculpture, dance – for Germans, music was considered the ultimate and most noble embodiment of the human spirit. How could one maintain this enlightened vision of bildung after witnessing the dark years of the Third Reich? That is the tragedy that confronted these two men. Strauss, a non-Jew, had to reconcile his prestigious position in the German musical establishment and his social status with the need to toady up to the Nazi brass to save the lives of  members of  his family by marriage who were Jewish. He never renounced Hitler or the Nazi party. Schonberg, who earlier in his life followed Gustav Mahler’s lead  and converted out of Judaism to the Lutheran church, was still forced into exile to escape the Nazis, and thrived in a German expatriate community in Los Angeles. The world war reawakened his self-identity as a Jew and forced a reassessment of his relationship to his fellow Jews. Eichler sees Strauss’ Metamorphosen and Schonberg’s Survivor of Warsaw as timeless musical monuments to those who suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis, works that gain their special power by being expressions of each man’s inner turmoil.

Britten and Shostakovich lived in an entirely different world than Strauss and Schonberg. Nonetheless, they too suffered though the ravages of the Second World War. Britten, a gay man and committed pacifist, never served in active military duty. But he witnessed the nightly bombings of England and the German artillery attacks along the coastline near where he lived. Shostakovich was alternatively celebrated and reviled by Stalin. He lived a life of continuous dread, trying to survive as a person and musician when a death sentence could come at a moment’s notice at the whim of the Great Leader. Britten was commissioned to write a musical piece to accompany the dedication of the Coventry Cathedral which had been nearly destroyed by a night-long Wehrmacht bombing raid; Shostakovich was inspired to write his 14^th Symphony after reading  Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1962 poem “Babi Yar”.  For Britten, the War Requiem was a pacifist’s response to the self-destructiveness of war and the grievous loss of a generation of young able-bodied men; Shostakovich’s work was his attempt to come to grips with the moral blindness of the Russian people who denied their complicity with the Nazi murder of 33,000 innocent Jewish men, women, and children at the ravine outside Kyiv in broad daylight, in one ghastly day.  

This overview hardly captures the dense description of these four men and the turbulent times they lived through. There are astonishing subplots and characters in each composer’s narrative. Eichler retells how Schonberg originally reached out to Serge Koussevitsky to premiere Survivor of Warsaw. When the conductor demurred, the inaugural concert ended up being performed by a community orchestra and choir in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When Britten toured the Displaced Person camps after World War II and played piano accompaniment with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin at Bergen Belsen, the intensity of his playing profoundly affected a young Venetian woman named Anita Lasker, who survived the Holocaust only because she had been enlisted to play in the inmates’ orchestra, directed by a colleague of Strauss and Schonberg. There is so much in Time’s Echo and the best advice is to allow yourself to be immersed in the book. 

Eichler is a precise and enthusiastic writer, and he fully captures the emotional toll of living through the two World Wars, in Germany, England, and Russia. The inhumanity of the trench warfare in World War I, the insane hatred driving the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in Europe, the unprecedented destructiveness of World War II, the senseless starvation and killing of millions of Russians during the forced agricultural collectivizations and the German siege of Leningrad – all of these are depicted by Eichler in stark prose. 

There is so much to comment on. Let me focus on one point – Eichler’s assertion that music is the optimal way to memorialize events in the past. To begin, one might question the need to remember altogether. In Zachor (University of Washington Press, 1982), Yosef Dov Yerushalmi documents how important memory is to the Jewish people. History is not a simple record of dates and facts. Instead, history and memory are meant to bring the past to life and reinforce faith and commitment. But David Rieff, in the book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies (Yale University Press, 2016), suggests that overemphasis on memory of past events can ensnare people in a web of accusations and counterclaims and weaken individual agency. And do the musical memorials composed by the four composers point a way forward to overcome the failings of the past or do they create an emotional trap? The swirling currents of hatred circling our world today give pause to any notion that the works of these composers have brought us any closer to a world of tolerance and peaceful coexistence.  

All of the senses participate in the formation of memory. Proust famously wrote about how the smell of a madeleine evoked deep-seated memories in one of his characters. Eichler gives pride of place to hearing and music. There is no question that hearing a particular popular song or piece of music often triggers recollection of pivotal moments in a person’s life. Eichler has a wonderful feeling for the musical compositions, which range from seven minutes to over an hour long and play such a central role in Time’s Echo. However, I wonder whether most of us can delve as deeply into the content and feelings articulated in a piece of music. It is not the evanescence of sound per se that makes me uncertain, because all sensory perceptions are transitory and both sights and sounds can be captured and reserved for posterity in photographs and recordings. But it is the complexity of classical music that I find daunting. In Rebecca Goldstein’s book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Pantheon, 2010), there is a scene in which a math prodigy and his genius friends are sitting around and for entertainment, they challenge each other to sing variations of famous classical music pieces like a Bach prelude shifted up by a third, changed from the major key to minor, or starting from the middle and going backwards. Do we need to understand music with such precision to be moved by the complicated creations of Schonberg, Straus, Britten, and Shostakovich? I’ve listened to the four pieces of music discussed in the book, and though I was moved, I know I was not as appreciative as Eichler of their artistry and nuance.  

Three of the compositions were accompanied by text to focus and amplify the impact of the music. Some of the choices were straightforward, like the poem by Yevtushenko. But the selection of works by Wilfred Owen to accompany the War Requiem and the words that Schonberg wrote to be read during the performance of Survivor of Warsaw contribute greatly to the emotional power of the two works. So much to ponder, so much to learn.

Echoes lose their intensity as they bounce off surfaces and spread out in space. Eichler’s book does not echo, it resonates and amplifies. It is overflowing with content that touches on so many topics and issues. It activates each one and gets them vibrating, different frequencies, different pitches. In the end, Time’s Echo creates a symphony of ideas that we can all read and listen to, one glorious mixed metaphor

TIME’S ECHO
Jeremy Eichler
Knopf, 2023, 386 pp