Jeremy Eichler

“For Schoenberg, equally discordant were the social expectations of his adoptive home, with all its backslapping optimism and compulsory cheerfulness. “It is difficult for us to smile incessantly,” he explained to one old friend, “when we would like to spit, to spit fire….[O]n no account may one speak the truth here—even when one knows it; even when the other does not know it; even when the other wants to know it: for that is the game.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

“Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”—“I am lost to the world”—a beautiful song that forms its own shelter from the flow of linear time, closing with words that bespeak the radical loneliness of attachment to a celestial ideal: “I live alone, in my heaven of love, devotion, and song.”
― Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance