Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, by Jeremy Eichler

I read this over the summer. Like Hi Honey, I’m Homo which covers the gay rights movement by examining representations of gays and lesbians in television sitcoms, and The Martyrs which tells the story of the civil rights movement through the stories of several persons murdered for their involvement in the struggle, Time’s Echo begins from a narrow focus, a study of four pieces of mid-20th century music, to tell a wider history of the catastrophe of the Second World War and the horror of the Holocaust.

Of the four compositions Eichler studies, I was familiar only with two. I know of Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw (1947) but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it, even in recording. I have heard Britten’s War Requiem (1962) performed live. I’ve heard Strauss’ Metamorphosen (1945) on recording. I have probably also heard Shostokovich’s Babi Yar symphony, number 13 (1962) but I can’t say I know the piece.

Eichler gives both a close examination of the music itself, as well as wonderfully researched and told stories of how the music came to be composed, and the influences on the composers leading to their compositions. He takes a wide perspective, beginning with Mendelsohn and including the development of German music and thought, and the shifting place of Jewishness within the culture. The writing is consistently smart, beautiful and emotionally affecting.

How surprising to learn that Survivor from Warsaw had it’s premiere in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Eichler’s insight that in the United Kingdom the First World War had the more lasting emotional impact helped me understand Britten’s choice of Wilfred Owens’ poetry for his Requiem rather than texts that would more explicitly reference the more recent war. I did not know of Britten’s and Shostakovich’s friendship and mutual admiration. The ghastly story of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Babi Yar, Ukraine was unknown to me. Eichler’s meditation on Richard Strauss’ ambivalent relationship to Nazi Germany leads to his theory that Metamorphosen is also a kind of memorial to the war and its victims, though not so literally as are the others.

Eichler’s main curiosity is to wonder how or whether music can serve as monuments in sound akin to physical monuments. He describes many such physical monuments and although considered more permanent than music also tells how statues and memorials have been dismantled or moved, or rebuilt or modified over time. A musical monument depends on a performance, which places the music in the present while also existing as a historical object from the date of its composition, and thus every performance comments on both what it meant then and what it means now, simultaneously. Britten’s War Requiem reaches back to the First World War while memorializing the second. Shostakovich’s Babi Yar symphony is both a setting of a poem about an incident from the war, but also an artifact of the Soviet Union’s control of its artists and arbiter of how its history is presented. Metamorphosen is perhaps in its silence a kind of eloquent testimony to moral issues of loyalty and betrayal Strauss felt forbidden to speak of. How music remembers the past and remakes the past in the present is a fascinating question, which Eichler’s meditations both answer and let linger.

I so admired and enjoyed this book. I learned much. I was consistently moved. I felt drawn through both the musical analysis and the history by an expert, sensitive hand. The book is a real accomplishment I recommend to anyone who cares about 20th century music.