★ 06/26/2023

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.)

*Winner of Three National Jewish Book Awards: the Everett Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion Book of the Year, the His­to­ry Ger­rard and Ella Berman Memo­r­i­al Award, and the Holo­caust Award in Mem­o­ry of Ernest W. Michel • Listed as one of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2023 and one of NPR's Books We Love • "History Book of the Year," Sunday Times of London*

"With exquisite storytelling, “Time’s Echo” explores how music provides a unique lens to understanding one of the darkest times in history . . . [Eichler] pulls back the curtain of these monumental compositions in a richly layered panorama that is part history, part musicology, and part travelogue." —Penny Schwartz, Jewish Journal

"We were stunned by [Time's Echo's] profundity, its masterful structure, its beautiful shimmering sentences. It is evidently a life’s work, a labor of love, and a testimony to the pain of war. It has an utterly unique voice, and it warrants being classed as a masterpiece of nonfiction writing.”—Shortlist citation, Jury of the Baillie Gifford Prize

“A symphonic project, masterfully orchestrated . . . [Eichler’s] antennae for the talismanic property of historic objects (Schiller’s writing desk, Beethoven’s compass), no less than for the choice detail about the people through whose hands they passed, verges on the clairvoyant . . . Against the din of our current war-torn, burn-it-down Iron Age, his voice sounds chords of hopeful enlightenment, even when the witness he bears makes the blood run cold. To paraphrase a verse set by Arnold Schoenberg, a central figure in Eichler’s narrative, his prose feels like air from another planet . . . In sweep and detail, Time’s Echo fuses the talents of a demon researcher, a gifted storyteller, and a world-class connector of dots.” —Matthew Gurewitsch, New Criterion

“A groundbreaking work . . . Eichler’s unique approach to explor­ing his­to­ry will like­ly com­pel read­ers to lis­ten to these com­po­si­tions for the first time or anew, empow­ered by a more nuanced under­stand­ing of their impor­tance.” —Jonathan Fass, Jewish Book Council

"The outstanding music book of this and several years." —Times Literary Supplement

"On the face of it, this is a book about a handful of composers whose lives were changed beyond measure by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War... But this book is also about landscape, from the mountains of Bavaria to the gates of Buchenwald, as well as music's extraordinary power to bridge the gap between past and present. It's written with a rare sensitivity to language and memory, reminiscent of WG Sebald...The result is not just a great book about the legacy of the Second World War, but a work of extraordinary power, beauty and human feeling." —"History Book of the Year," The Sunday Times of London

“Time’s Echo is a remarkable book. Jeremy Eichler shows how listening to history through its music can transport us in mind, body, and spirit — resulting in a profound, detailed resurrection of the past into the living present. The composers at the book’s heart come across not as distant historical figures but as fully human characters with whom we can identify. The result is a kind of time travel with music as our mode of transport, a poignant journey back to an era that still affects us, and an inspiringly hopeful meditation on the power of art to remember not just the traumas of the past but also its highest ideals.” —Yo-Yo Ma

"A work of vast historical scholarship and acute musical insights." —John Adams, The New Yorker

"Like Sebald, Eichler is a gifted storyteller, a poet-in-prose who portrays the lives of composers and their music while braiding strands of both personal and political history. He becomes a modern Virgil: with Eichler as our guide, we travel, like Dante’s pilgrim, through the hell of Europe’s twentieth century . . . [Eichler] succeed[s] in weaving together cultural background and musical description in a way that avoids reduction, honoring the relative autonomy of music while also acknowledging its historical resonance." —Peter E. Gordon, New York Review of Books

“[A] masterful debut . . . Vivid, luminous prose . . . [Time’s Echo is] a moving declaration of the power of music to transmit human feeling across time.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[Jeremy Eichler] connects the fluidity of musical time to personal and historical memory. Despite detailed endnotes, Time's Echo is not a reference book. Carefully researched and capacious in scope, it reads as elegy: mournful, elegant and gratifying... Toward the end, Eichler quotes a letter from Shostakovich to Britten... [which] provides a wonderful summary for Time's Echo: 'Your music is the most outstanding phenomenon of the twentieth century. And for me it is the source of profound and powerful impressions. Write as much as possible. It is necessary for humanity — and certainly for me.'"—Martha Anne Toll, The Washington Post

“Profoundly moving . . . An absorbing read for serious music lovers that may well become a classic in music criticism.”—Library Journal (starred review)

"Eichler, The Boston Globe’s chief classical music critic, suggests that music can help us remember what we’ve lost. Time’s Echo is an engrossing recovery project that reveals the depths of Europe’s ability — and inability — to mourn those losses. On the surface Eichler’s book is a cultural history of four musical works… More deeply, it is a fascinating call to place the stories of musicians into our acts of listening and a compelling testimony to the relationship between music and remembrance…Time’s Echo offers the same kind of immersive experience that [Eichler] encourages us to explore in music. His beautiful meditation on the dark shadows that compelled, propelled and ultimately haunted classical music in Europe during and after World War II inspires our ears." —Kira Thurman, The New York Times

“Evocative….Mr. Eichler is an eloquent writer with a poetic bent; his text is lyrical and well-researched.” —Stuart Isacoff, Wall Street Journal

“I was deeply moved by this wonderful book. Jeremy Eichler writes profoundly on music, and in Time’s Echo he focuses on music that expresses so much about the truly tragic history of the 20th century. He not only makes us understand, he makes us feel.”—Emanuel Ax

“Authoritative . . . Fascinating and, in its own way, inspiring.”—Kirkus Reviews

"...Erudite, passionately argued, and extraordinarily moving... In a seamless web of historical context, nuanced musical analysis, deft quotation, and his own first-person accounts of travel to relevant sites, Eichler fashions a narrative worthy of one of his principal inspirations, the elegiac novels of W.G. Sebald." —Christopher Benfey, The Boston Globe

“Profoundly moving. I am overwhelmed by what Jeremy Eichler has achieved.”—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“Music is an airy, abstract art, yet every note is grounded in history and in the earth. Jeremy Eichler, one of our finest writers on music, captures that duality supremely well in Time’s Echo, his eagerly awaited first book. Delving into twentieth-century musical memorials by Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich, Eichler evokes not only the smoldering power of the music but also the haunted lives and places from which these masterpieces sprang. It is a work of searching scholarship, acute critical observation, philosophical heft, and deep feeling.”—Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise

“This passionate book delves deep into classical music’s responses to World War II, and the tragic intertwining of German and Jewish cultures. Eichler roves through history and language to express how music keeps cultural memory alive. Along the way, he paints an unforgettable portrait of an unspeakable time.”—Jeremy Denk, author of Every Good Boy Does Fine

“At a time when debates rage daily over what histories to memorialize and which to reinterpret, along comes Jeremy Eichler to reveal how music preserves the past in the form of intense emotional experience. With a historian’s deep understanding of how societies respond to the trauma of war, and an intuitive feel for music’s molten heat, he brings us a lucid, moving chronicle of four dramatically different works that were born of the same urge: Zachor—Remember.”—Justin Davidson, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, New York magazine

“How is the past remembered or forgotten? History can often amount to little more than a tired archivist logging away dates and factoids. But as Jeremy Eichler reveals in this splendid and uncompromising book, music is mankind’s imperishable monument to what memory will not and cannot suppress.”—André Aciman, author of Find Me

“In this brilliant, haunting debut, Jeremy Eichler expands our sense of how collective memory works in history. With music, humanity can engage its losses, registering monstrous crimes aurally if invisibly. And while the experience of hearing the notes provides no exact facsimile of what was lost — let alone makes things whole again — it can knit together past and present with remarkable poignancy. Eichler overlays the arresting insight and beautiful prose of the cultural interpreter on the scholarly perspective of a master historian, and the results are a gift for us all.”—Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

“A most rare book: extraordinarily powerful — magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human.”—Philippe Sands, author of The Last Colony

★ 07/14/2023

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

2023-05-23
A respected cultural historian delves into music that serves as “a carrier of memory for a post-Holocaust world.”

Not all memorials are made of chiseled stone. Some of the most enduring are evocative pieces of music, often integrating spoken narratives. Eichler, chief classical music critic at the Boston Globe, focuses on four major composers of the period following World War II: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Refreshingly, the author makes no attempt to hide their flaws. Strauss made compromises with the Nazi regime, although in the end he admitted the depth of his failings—as demonstrated in his masterful Metamorphosen, which also commemorated the victims of the war. In many of his works, Shostakovich complied with the Stalinist precept that art must serve the state, but in his later symphonies, he radically changed course, condemning Hitler's and Stalin's atrocities with equal force. Schoenberg struggled to find a balance between his German cultural roots and his Jewish heritage, a duality reflected in his calibrated dissonance and innovative scaling. A Survivor From Warsaw is a powerful example of music as memorial. Britten, a committed pacifist, was conflicted by the idea of commemorative music, concerned that it would seem triumphalist. However, in War Requiem, he captured the complexity of war and the importance of humane responses to it. Eichler's examination of these artists and their works is authoritative, but the book is not an easy read. The text is dense, and some of the author’s detours, such as his lengthy discourse on Mendelsohn, do not seem to fit his theme. He also assumes that readers will have a detailed grasp of classical music. Consequently, this book is not for everyone, but those who choose to accept the challenge will find it fascinating and, in its own way, inspiring.

A noteworthy piece of scholarship giving context and depth to key composers and their work.