Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

by Jeremy Eichler

A stirring account of how music bears witness to history and carries forward the memory of the wartime past

In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,” he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, “the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.”

When it comes to how societies remember these increasingly distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of history books, archives, documentaries, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time’s Echo, the award-winning critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler makes a passionate and revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.

With a critic’s ear, a scholar’s erudition, and a novelist’s eye for detail, Eichler shows how four towering composers—Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten—lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving, transcendent works of music, scores that echo lost time. Summoning the supporting testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians, and everyday citizens, Eichler reveals how the essence of an entire epoch has been inscribed in these sounds and stories. Along the way, he visits key locations central to the music’s creation, from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral to the site of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv.

As the living memory of the Second World War fades, Time’s Echo proposes new ways of listening to history, and learning to hear between its notes the resonances of what another era has written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the renewed promise of art for our lives today.

Genres: History, Music, Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II, War, Jewish

400 pages, Hardcover

First published August 29, 2023

Reviews

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you know me, you’ll know that there are two subjects which seem to get under my skin like no others. Time’s Echo, in all its gorgeousness, covers both of them (and very well too). It should be unsurprising, then, that it is a book from which I’m going to struggle to remain critically aloof.

It’s a book of many shades, in part a critical history of four great composers told through the lens of their post-war musical memorials (Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13), in part a Sebaldian muse on the nature of time and remembrance in the wake of the Enlightenment dream’s collapse — a When We Cease to Understand the World for Classical Music, if you like —, and in part also a memorial in and of itself to the pain and senselessness of the Holocaust. It grabbed me from its outset. It may even have succeeded in ending my reading slump.

You see, far more than usual, these past few months I have been deep in the grips of an obsession with music, one which has found me reading less and less and listening more and more. I’ve fallen into a life-phase of frequenting concerts as much as possible, often going into London on my own for an evening, sitting in reverent silence as any one of the world’s great orchestras churns away in front of me, my mind “lost to the world/With which I used to waste much time”.

It was one of these solitary evenings, in fact, which finally moved me to open this book (Eichler having been on my radar for some time). Of all the concerts I’ve been to over the last few months, it was the one with the following programme that particularly caught my eye and struck me as a “must-see”: Billed as “A Dark Century”, its programme ran like this:

Arnold Schoenberg — A Survivor From Warsaw (1947)
Mieczysław Weinberg — Violin Concerto (1959)
Dimitri Shostakovich — Symphony No. 13 (“Babi Yar”) (1962)

“A dark programme indeed”, I thought, and promptly snapped up a good seat on the website. I like my music bleak. Shostakovich, in particular, is easily a top 5 composer for me (I believe there is no greater expression of rage in music than that which is expressed across the vast oeuvre of this small and meek-looking bespectacled man). The choral 13th is one of his most profoundly stirring works; an act of real bravery, it is both terrifying and sad, but mostly I admire it as one of the most humane statements of a composer whose whimpering humanity never fails to astound.





On the night of the concert, I arrived at the Royal Festival Hall about half an hour early. I found none other than Jeremy Eichler himself at the back of the lobby area, giving a free pre-concert talk, his soft American voice drifting across the large room as he articulated some of the historical context of the night’s upcoming concert to a sea of grey-haired heads.

It wasn’t until I picked up a programme that I understood who Eichler was: Author of Time’s Echo, and “Writer in Residence for the London Philharmonic Orchestra” (whatever that means). It all made perfect sense: two of the four pieces of music Time’s Echo focuses on were on that night’s programme, after all. Slightly annoyed to have missed the body of Eichler’s talk, I went upstairs and took my seat.

What followed was a concert of rare and bracing power. A Survivor From Warsaw, a piece which is only 6 or 7 minutes long, but one which Milan Kundera nevertheless justifiably called “the greatest memorial ever dedicated to the Holocaust”, opened the programme and immediately achieved the most unusual of concert hall feats: to end at full volume and yet be greeted with a few moments of startled silence, silence from an audience who felt like rabbits caught in the headlights. Broken music for a broken epoch.

World-famous Latvian violinist, Gidon Kremer, brought an unusually soft, delicate tone to Weinberg’s dark violin concerto, music which seemed to endlessly descend down into the night. As an encore, Kremer played an unaccompanied piece by Ukrainian composer Valentyn Silvestrov. This he dedicated to the victims of the Russian invasion. Even sitting near the front, I had to strain to hear the soft eulogy of his solo violin, a sound which seemed to echo in the silence of the Royal Festival Hall’s otherwise dry acoustic.

However, it was Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony which had really brought me into London that night, and it did not disappoint. Shostakovich never lets me down: There is no better a sound than that sonic wall which radiates out from a full symphony orchestra when experienced in the flesh, unamplified and up close (I include a SpaceX Starship launch on this list), and very few composers build as forceful a wall as does Shostakovich. His unsubtle and pulverising orchestrations can feel overwhelming. The primal 13th is an hour-long journey through darkness, often restrained and controlled, but occasionally rising to a select few crescendos of apocalyptic rage and intensity, notably in the first movement (a damning indictment of the Soviet authority’s attempts to eradicate the history of the Babi Yar Massacre and downplay the “Holocaust by Bullets” that took place in Eastern Europe), and at the climax of the third movement (a tribute to the women of the Soviet Union):

“They have endured everything,
they will continue to endure everything.
Nothing in the world is beyond them —
they have been granted such strength!
It is shameful to short-change them!
It is sinful to short-weight them!”

Experienced in the flesh, the hair-raising fortissimo from the orchestra, choir and bass soloist which accompanies the words “It is shameful to short-change them! It is sinful to short-weight them!” was something that will remain with me for a long time. This is music to split the atom and set the fibres of your nerves alight. For some reason I find it incredibly moving that, in a symphony which depicts some of the worst things humans have ever done to each other, Shostakovich saves his real ire for this apparently small injustice. The problem of inhumanity starts with the smallest wrongs, I guess.

Shostakovich quite literally risked his life to present the 13th’s bird’s eye view of Soviet oppression to his fellow countrymen. Oddly, the symphony becomes lighter towards its fifth and final movement. The dark opening theme, first sung by the all-male choir at the chilling opening of the first movement now re-materializes, transformed into a light dance-like melody. The choir and soloist sing about how the great scientists and artists “Shakespeare or Pasteur, Newton or Tolstoy” had had mud slung at them because they’d “reached for the stratosphere”. As the almost nursery rhyme-like sounds of the symphony creepily fade into nothingness, Shostakovich leaves the audience with these last words:

“I’ll take their careers as an example!
I believe in their sacred belief,
and their belief gives me courage.
I’ll follow my career in such a way
that I’m not following it!”

There is a final toll on a tubular bell, and the symphony is lost to the ether, a raindrop on a gust of wind. Resolute in the face of impending censorship, Shostakovich’s message seems to be this: In a broken world, I can only try to speak. I will keep trying; however, the madness will go on…

It’s a really strange ending, one which I don’t think I understood properly until I saw the work performed.

I left the Festival Hall lost entirely in my own head and wandered out along the freezing cold Southbank in a weary Sebaldian reverie. Shostakovich’s musical monument had certainly achieved its aim, and despite his opening movement's insistence that “there is no memorial above Babi Yar”, his music’s existence proves the opposite. He has gifted posterity the most extraordinary, viscerally powerful, and timeless memorial to the victims of the “Holocaust by Bullets” we can hope for, a memorial which I hope will stand above Babi Yar for all time. It certainly hung over me and my thoughts for a few days, and so, in its wake, I eventually found myself picking up Time’s Echo. A perfect book to go with a perfect concert:

“Theodor Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher, critic, and musical sage, famously pronounced that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. Yet Adorno returned many times to the question of art in the wake of atrocity, ultimately revising his opinion to honor art’s powers of witness. In 1962 he wrote, “The concept of a resurrection of culture after Auschwitz is illusory and senseless, and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is forced to pay a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise, it needs art as its unconscious chronicle.”

The role of music in particular as an “unconscious chronicle” — as a witness to history and as a carrier of memory for a post-Holocaust world — is the subject of this book.”

This is non-fiction; however, Eichler has assembled his book in such an artful way that it becomes a reading experience which feels closer to a novel (Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn is never far away). For one thing, Eichler is never afraid to tell us how he feels and what he thinks when he visits some site of historical importance. He looks at the histories of each of his four chosen composers in chronological order, asking what it was that led them to write their musical memorials. He starts with Richard Strauss and the aged composer’s blackly elegiac Metamorphosen (1946), perhaps the most enigmatic piece of Eichler’s four. In Metamorphosen Strauss repeatedly quotes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, a piece which Beethoven originally wrote in homage to Napoleon before becoming disillusioned with Napoleon’s ceaseless warmongering. Beethoven famously tore his dedication to Napoleon out from the front page of his symphony’s handwritten original copy. Eichler compares the death of Beethoven’s faith in Napoleon’s dream to the death of Strauss’s dream. At the end of Metamorphosen, Strauss’s eulogy to a dream — not the Nazi dream, but perhaps some wider dream of a utopian German future —, Strauss quotes Beethoven’s melody one final time and then writes “In Memoriam” into his score. The question of what exactly he’s memorialising is never entirely clear, but I think Strauss’s diaries give us a fairly clear indication:

“The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.”

Eichler ultimately compares Metamorphosen to the remaining stump of Goethe’s oak, a famous tree under which Goethe is said to have written many of his great verses. Having come to represent the German Enlightenment dream, Goethe’s oak, by a curious twist of fate, ended up encircled within the walls of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Within a few years of the camp’s opening, the tree withered and died, the toxic soil on which it stood neither able to support life nor the lie of a dream turned sour.

“On a recent visit I found its heartwood almost entirely obscured by stones, placed in accordance with a Jewish tradition of symbolically marking the graves of the dead to signal they have not been forgotten. This stump is what remains of Goethe’s oak. In the end Metamorphosen’s upwellings of grief, its spiraling sorrows, its network of links to Beethoven’s sublime music of mourning, are all gestures akin to the placing of such stones — for this too is music of farewell, a pebble on the grave of German culture’s utopian dream. Adapting the language of the Goethe poem that still beats somewhere far below the rippling surface of this music: what it is, what it was, what it could have been. In memoriam.”

Through passages like the one described above, Eichler argues that, rather than imposing negatives on the art of remembrance (as did thinkers like Adorno), music’s Proustian powers for igniting recollection make it, in truth, ideally placed to act as a memorial, more so even than stone. For that alone, I love this book. Even the thought of music brings me great joy and sadness: It is a gift, and Time's Echo understands that. Music is a gift even when it reveals to us the extent of our pain. Eichler’s approach is impressively intelligent and multidisciplinary, covering everything from obscure literature to Richard Dimbleby’s 1945 broadcast covering the shocking scenes he’d witnessed at the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen (mandatory listening but difficult to stomach even in our Holocaust desensitised world); even so, I think this book is at its best when it’s at its most simple. Indeed, Eichler perhaps evokes the power of music and its ability to act as a vehicle for remembrance best when he describes the emotions of the great German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, just after he’d performed at the 1962 premiere of the unbelievable shattering masterpiece that is Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (for me, by far the greatest of all the great pieces of music discussed in this book, and yet, somehow, the only one I’ve so far neglected to mention):

“Among the evening’s soloists, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was the only one with actual military experience, having been drafted into the German army. During the war, he tended horses in Russia, lost a disabled brother to Nazi eugenics policy, and was captured by the Americans in Italy. After all of these experiences, participating in the Requiem became a deeply personal affair. “I was completely undone,” he later recalled. Even Pears could not coax him out of the choir stalls when it was time to leave. “I did not know where to hide my face,” he added. “Dead friends and past suffering arose in my mind.””

“I hope it'll make people think a bit.” — Benjamin Britten

[Martha Anne Toll]

Here's my review of this book for the Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...

‘Time’s Echo’ richly explores music and the history of the Holocaust
Jeremy Eichler writes about four prominent composers, exploring how their signature works reflect the horrific times in which they lived.

Review by Martha Anne Toll
October 2, 2023 at 9:00 p.m. ED

In “Time’s Echo,” Jeremy Eichler knits together the history of the Holocaust and classical music before, during and after the cataclysm. Eichler explores two questions: How might we come to “know, honor, commemorate, feel a connection to, or most simply live with the presence of the past?” and how might we return works of art and music to history, so they become “a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost?”

Eichler, the chief classical music critic for the Boston Globe and a cultural historian, takes four prominent composers with differing backgrounds and nationalities — Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten — and grounds them in their cultural antecedents, exploring how their signature compositions reflect the horrific times in which they lived. (The more the reader knows about music, the more likely this dense, beautiful book will resonate.) In the key through line, he 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.

Music is notoriously difficult to get on the page. It is a great challenge to describe the lamentations of specific composers.

We may know Strauss as a gifted composer of tone poems and operas, but he was also someone who had a troubling and opportunistic relationship with Nazi leadership. In an ironic twist, he ended up having to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren from the Nazi maw. We may know Schoenberg as the inventor of the 12-tone row, but here, we also see him as a secular Jew whose prescient efforts to sound the alarm for European Jewry went unheeded.

Eichler organizes chapters around themes, rather than people or events. He weaves in contemporaneous cultural influences from literature, visual arts, philosophy and academia.

The German-Austrian Jewish composers Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler and Schoenberg are considered in the first chapter, where Eichler describes the 19th-century Jewish dream of “emancipation through culture.” He interprets the German word “Bildung” (as in bildungsroman) to signify “a faith in the ability of literature, music, philosophy, and poetry to renovate the self, to shape one’s moral sensibilities, and to guide one toward a life of aesthetic grace.”

Subsequent chapters consider the impact of World War I on what was to come, and what it means both to remember and to forget history’s catastrophes. Nothing points up the psychosis of Nazi ideology better than pairing lofty concepts such as Bildung with the Nazi death machine. A chapter called “The Emancipation of Memory” juxtaposes the Nazi celebration of Friedrich Schiller’s 175th birthday with the story of Schoenberg’s cousin Arthur, a civil engineer who had played a leading role in creating Munich’s buildings and infrastructure. Arthur pleaded with the Munich city council not to nullify his citizenship and subject him to “the tragedy of homelessness” at age 60.

Eichler notes that later scholars would call this type of appeal a reflection of the “bureaucratization of genocide.” Within nine months of being deported to Terezin, Arthur and his wife were dead. The Nazis successfully killed the carefully woven connections between Jewish intellectuals and artists and the concept of Bildung. The genocide was so far beyond imagination that the BBC delayed airing Richard Dimbleby’s real-time descriptions of Bergen-Belsen. The London office just couldn’t believe it.

Encapsulating the literature of trauma, Eichler writes that the survivor cannot move on until the telling of the trauma “has been truly witnessed.” Music is part of that witnessing.

Having performed as a violist in a Britten opera and orchestral pieces, I was particularly moved by Eichler’s discussions of the English composer. Born in the coastal English town of Lowestoft, Britten was an infant when World War I broke out. His uncle was killed in the Battle of the Somme, and a shell fired by the German fleet narrowly missed the family home.

Eichler delves into Britten’s titanic composition “War Requiem,” which premiered in 1962 in the newly consecrated Coventry Cathedral (the original was destroyed by German bombs during World War II). “War Requiem” is scored for two orchestras and an organ. Three vocal soloists and two choirs sing WWI poetry by Wilfred Owen as well as the Latin Requiem. The piece was Britten’s “culminating artistic statement of a life spent responding in varying degrees to the human capacity for cruelty, and society’s capacity for violence against its own members once they had been branded as other.”

A short review does not lend itself to a thorough exploration of a book as rich as this, where a consideration of Shostakovich’s music includes a discussion of Sigmund Freud and Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Eichler pairs the music of Paul Hindemith with the literature of W.G. Sebald. Eichler is so taken with Sebald that he adopts the writer’s visual design — uncaptioned photographs interspersed with the text.

Toward the end, Eichler quotes a letter from Shostakovich to Britten that suggests the Russian composer’s tortured relationship with Stalin. The letter 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’s debut novel, “Three Muses,” was published last fall. Her second, “Duet for One,” is forthcoming in early 2025.

[Zachary Herde · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are a musician involved in any form of what we would call western classical music, then this book is a required read. How does music become a living, breathing memory and in what ways can it help us to remember the history, traumatic or joyous, of humanity's collective existence? That is a question that Mr. Eichler attempts to answer by looking at four composers and four seminal works of remembrance in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Shoah. In discussing these works, he also gives the historical context of music within the three distinct geographies of the composers themselves-Germany, England, and Russia.

I think, now that we are mostly separated by more than one generation from WWII, we are starting to slip into the very apathy and forgetfulness that many authors of the time were afraid of. But this book reveals and reminds us that music, its history, its meaning, the people who write it, the people who perform it, are all brought to full focus again when compositions are performed. Maybe this will help save us from ourselves.

I could write a whole lot more but my thoughts are not connecting well here. Please read and please remember.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work of art. By far the best book I have read on history and music.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest nonfiction books I've ever read in my entire life. Eichler has managed to blend the expansive personal histories that all connect to what is a defining watershed moment in human history (the Holocaust) to sweeping philosophical and metaphysical questions about art and music. Make no mistake, this is not a niche microhistory book for people who love and listen to a lot of classical music. I know because I am not one of those people and Time's Echo still blew my doors off.

The four composers we follow each looked out their respective windows and tried to capture what resisted all interpretation. The Holocaust was the death of meaning, the moment when humanity had lost its mind and delved into the darkest depths of its malicious soul. It is perhaps the most heinous thing the human animal is capable of and is not likely to be topped. Even the tools of the poets and authors buckle under the weight and admit that they can only bite off small chunks of the event. Nobody can quite capture all of it (and I don't think anyone is saying that these composers succeeded where they failed).

So how did these four composers take a medium as quicksilver and ephemeral as music and use it to pin down the emotions of the time, to immortalize the feeling, and memorialize the dead?

Eichler makes a fascinating case for music as a monument by explaining those invisible connections to some higher truth or plane of existence (another recent read of mine that I read around the same time as Time's Echo, Childhood's End makes a subtle nod to that plane that music exists on and transports us to). Music transcends fact. It is immune to censorship because those who would silence and restrict expression are blind to that beauty and higher truth. The ground-tone's of truth and human connection have been severed, and it becomes the foxhole that artists can burrow in times of strife and conflict.

Many of the composers connect to ongoing discussions about art in surprising ways. Strauss's all-too-eagerness at working with the Nazi's and denying their influence and power while having every door opened to him is instantly recognizable in today's climate of social climbers, careerists, and morally dubious ladders. Shostakovich represents a complex portrait of a man who benefits or suffers from whatever lens you apply to his life where what history rings as true for him largely depends on what the reader and listener want to belive. Fact becomes debatable, up for interpretation. Similarly, the way the USSR sought to censor his work shines a light on the paradigm Russia has with art and how it contrasts so starkly with America. Russia believes in the power of art and America does not. Yet America still engages in censorship because it believes in something it believes to be greater: the market.

One of the most compelling ideas under the microscope is how valid aestheticizing the dead is, especially regarding one of the most horrible tragedies of all time. The push and pull of trivializing these deaths versus using the power of expression to work through grief and chronicle the event through feeling at the time is a satisfying argument where Eichler plays both sides. Ultimately, I am on the side of art and expression, but he gives this element so much weight when its very notion would seem to undermine him and his goals with this book that you cannot help but be amazed when it doesn't and his strength as a writer.

And my goodness, what a revelation Eichler is as a historian. His prose is lush and heartbreaking and he manages to string together some of the most relevant and texturally evocative testimonies and quotes about music, performances, art, philosophy, and history-- all in one package.

Part of my interest in reading this book was a hope to contextualize what I'm seeing right now in Gaza. I found few answers to help grasp how Israel could be capable of something like this when Jews were on the blunt end of injustice the world had never known. My heart continues to grieve for the innocent of the present, and new wounds open for those in the past. Words are our primary tools to communicate and archive the world, but we cannot discount the role and power of music, and the shadow history casts on all art and personhood.

Eichler mentions numerous standing ovations, thundering applause, and intense reactions by audiences. Whether the "correct" response to this book is a raucous shout or a curt nod and a letter sent after the performance, I hope it has come across here. Whether it is appropriate or not, I stand and applaud Time's Echo and beg for an encore from this author.

[A2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having not read a nonfiction book for pleasure in over five years, I approached Time's Echo with existential doubt: was it possible for me to enjoy a story in which every event is a well-researched fact? Yo-Yo Ma, in his advance praise on the back cover, seemed to think so; his word, a non-scholar’s, was enough for me to look past the catch-all subtitle, the eighty pages of back matter, the Columbia Ph.D.—and dive right in.

Within a few pages, Eichler tells us that the book we are about to read draws “particularly deep inspiration” from the novelist W. G. Sebald, an author whose work I know and love. He is the perfect north star for Time’s Echo, in its grappling with great questions of the past through objects, wanderings, and connections.

On objects: Goethe’s oak opens the Prelude and it reappears chapters later as a stump; a statue of Mendelssohn in Leipzig is erected, then destroyed in a bombing, then resurrected with the same message in the Coda; Schiller’s writing desk is cruelly copied for the safekeeping of the original; Benjamin’s monograph by Klee depicts, the author argues, an angel of history. These objects, mere curiosities on their own, serve here as important signposts in time.

On wanderings: I appreciate that Eichler is a character in his own work of history. At the end of select chapters, he visits a location of significance from the text: the Rosé’s residence at Pyrkergasse 23, Strauss’s home in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Schoenberg’s gravestone in Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof, or Coventry Cathedral. Each visit, narrated in the first person, contains a Sebaldian discovery of sorts, that is to say a discovery made in spite of slight disappointment and the lingering question: What am I doing here, really? It feels only fitting that he is denied access to Strauss’s documents—the artifice of nonfiction crumbles when you realize that Time’s Echo was so close to being something else.

On connections: With a novelist’s eye, Eichler locates the episodes from real life that played out with the force of fiction. Schoenberg emigrates to the United States, first settling in Brookline, Massachusetts before heading west to L.A. to be Shirley Temple’s less famous neighbor. He is a stranger in a strange land who finally hears his own music being played at a roadside orange juice stand. One of the book’s most impressive feats is presenting Britten and Shostakovich as independently fierce chroniclers of their nations’ traumas, only to reveal toward the end their mutual admiration and correspondence. And as Britten took his last breaths, Bernstein was conducting Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony (dedicated to none other than B.B. himself) with the New York Philharmonic. Coincidences aside, the life of a composition is plenty cinematic in Eichler’s hand: it was my pleasure—yes, my pleasure!—to read about how each work of music came to be and how the public responded to its premiere.

The cast of characters is superb. I love how prominently Zweig features in the Strauss storyline, how Kandinsky responds to Schoenberg’s revolutionary String Quartet No. 2, how Mann lifts the twelve-tone technique for Doctor Faustus. Lesser-known composers and musicians populate the fringes, like Foulds (with his flawed World Requiem), Walter, and Lasker. This is also an academic manuscript at heart, one arguing for a new interpretation of music’s place in history. Eichler freely employs jargon like Bildung and Innerlichkeit (explained with the utmost clarity) while dazzling us with just-right quotes from Benjamin, Celan, Hemingway, Schafer, and more. He knows the era as if he lived through it, with the additional benefit of hindsight.

Time’s Echo is tapestry nonfiction, the type of nonfiction not about a single person or event or idea but rather about the crosscurrents of an era. It is an ambitious book of ideas that I believe every devotee of music, history, or literature should read at least once. And it showed me, perhaps, where fiction falls short: in nonfiction, since everything is connected by the thread of truth, a tapestry holds fast.

[Paul Lemcke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely outstanding book, especially for readers who are also lovers and students of classical music. It features primarily four composers: Schoenberg, R. Strauss, Britten and Shostakovich and surrounds them in the Great War, giving us a new view of the war and the Jewish genocide through their music. Each of the four was highly controversial in their work, in their beliefs, and in their musical response to that era, and Eichler described each controversy with originality and with a perspective that delivered shock and surprise over and over. I listened to Schoenberg's disturbing Survivor from Warsaw as I read about his commitment to save Judaism; I listened to Richard Strauss' gorgeous and poignant Metamorphosen as I struggled with my feelings about Strauss himself; I listened to Britten's War Requiem and was deeply moved, learning how he brought the music to life; I listened to Shostakovich's 13th and 14th symphonies and could feel the intense sadness and loss. This is not a biography of these four composers, but more like a historical telling of the tragedy and horror of the Second World War through the eyes of these men and through their music. I must say that the final chapter called Coda: Listening to Lost Time was brilliant. In just a few pages, it pulled together all the biggest ideas and philosophies, and it made me want to read the book again immediately.
So can you enjoy this book if you don't know these composers, and other composers who were important but not one of the central four, such as Bach and Beethoven and Mendelssohn? I think, maybe, but I think the text and the music truly hit home for readers with a decent knowledge about these men, their backgrounds, and their music. I am a relative novice in all of this, but I had enough base knowledge and loads of curiosity, and every word and every note moved me.

[MaryEllen Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible book, very difficult to read on several levels, but well worth the effort. I initially got the book after reading a review, and fascinated by the concept of music and memory wanted to read this take. After having just returned from a trip to Germany it was a complementary view to reconciling the Holocaust, War and trauma with memorializations in the form of statues and/or musical compositions. An in-depth look at the difficulties and struggles of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dimitri Shostakovich to find their place in history and represent memory of war/atrocities in their work in unique and unprecedented ways. I found that listening to the pieces themselves interspersed with the reading made a very enriching experience. The author's writing style is engaging and poetic itself which enhanced the reading experience. I'm still processing what I read as well as the incredible musical selections I've listened to along the way.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find it difficult to review this book. Depending on my mood, I could just have easily given the book 2 or 3 stars. In sum, it discusses the experiences of four composers in dealing with the second world war and/or the holocaust: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich. As the subtitle indicates, it addresses three areas: the second world war, the holocaust, and the music of remembrance. But in none of these areas is the book comprehensive. No discussion of the Terezin composers that I can remember or of any other composers who addressed WWII or the holocaust in their music. I enjoyed the sections on Shostakovich and Schoenberg the most, I did not discover anything new about Richard Strauss, and including Britten was a bit of a stretch. I also had trouble staying awake reading the introduction.

I read this on Kindle; I may have enjoyed it more as an audiobook.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This blew me away! I didn’t know if I would really connect with it, since my experience with classical music is positive but casual. While this is complex, nuanced, and detailed it is also clear and understandable, really enlightening! It is more than just about music, it is a philosophical work about the nature of war, history, culture, art, memorialization, memory, and music. Thought-provoking.
I listened to this by Books on Tape, this was great. Production great, reading by the author great. I was worried about the author’s soft voice for about the first thirty seconds, but his voice and reading turned out to be perfect.
My only concern is, when I go and listen to the musical works discussed, will I be able to hear what the author describes with my untrained ears?

[Zach Reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastically written book exploring many of the facets of music (particularly 20th classical music) that makes music such an interesting thing to study.

The inescapable blend of timing, history - both personal and cultural - and artistic manner makes each piece transport us to the moment of creation. In the case of Strauss, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Britten (amongst the many others referenced in the book), these were profound and often utterly devastating moments in a past that is much closer than it feels.

[Alex Ring · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book for lovers of 20th century classical music and its history. This book attempts a lot, and succeeds at most of it. Being familiar with the four main composers and their works/contributions will certainly help, but the technical writing about music is clearly presented, and enhances careful listening of the highlighted pieces. My one gripe is that the author’s stated attempt to channel Sebald doesn’t quite work. The Sebaldian tropes are there, but the author is pursuing a bit too pointed of an agenda to properly channel the softness and haziness of a great Sebald work.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

TIME'S ECHO The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance weaves the many themes that characterize Germany, Austria and other major nations together during the late 19th century and early 20th century. It concentrates on the lives of four men of musical genius:

I have been reading this book for a number of weeks now. I listen to a little bit every day. It is read with a gentleness that emphasizes the importance of its events and the beauty of the words that are spoken. It is a work of art that discusses horrors unimaginable and music that speaks in the sounds of God.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not finish this book. The book appeared to be well researched, but it read too much like a textbook designed for classical music lovers. I am confident that there is an audience for this book, and will pass it along accordingly. {H}

[Brady Meyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rich kaleidoscope that reflects the horrific images of Holocaust and WWII with contemporary music, art, architecture, philosophy, literature, poetry, and journalism. The beautiful descriptions of the music of Strauss, Schonberg, Britten, and Shostakovich are paired with a huge amount of new-to-me authors and artists to explore. Eichler deftly weaves together an endless tapestry of these disparate voices to create his own monument to the dead. Embedded throughout the text are dark and haunting black and white photos, documenting the landscape and city life of the war years. This book is a stark reminder that sometimes art isn’t meant to entertain; it should teach us, humble us, inspire us, and it should remind us of what we are capable of, both good and bad. As Eichler writes: “[Memorials] request that we listen to the past through music’s ears, that we recall particular moments in a linked history of catastrophe, and that this memory then informs our choices of the values we wish to perpetuate into the future.”

Two of the myriad of quotes that resonated deeply within me:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” - William Faulkner
“The future will not judge us for forgetting, but for remembering all too well and still not acting in accordance with those memories.” - Andreas Huyssen

[Yufeng · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply touching memoir, through the lives and arts of four great musicians, of the second world war, human virtues and follies, and memory itself. A beautiful message coherently echoes throughout the stories of people, in different nations and time. That is, in the despair of tragedy, art rises above and takes on the special role of embodying the truth, as well as the unspeakable emotions and ideals; in particularly music, with its unique dynamical timelessness, revives and refreshes the forgotten moments and emotions, takes on everything that happens along its path, and serves as a powerful memorial of the past and our remembrance. The book successfully weaved together some complex threads of art, the artists, and stories of their time. We see not only how individuals drift in the torrent of history, but also how individual spirits, in the form of art, reflect the society and shape our paths forward. A thoughtful reference in the book is how it traces the story of Mendelssohn's statue from the start to the end. Perhaps it symbolizes the unique type of monuments that music serves as--reverence of humanity, the past and its ideal being recalled, rediscovered, sometimes despite the darkness and suppression of the time, each time with something new in them.

[Patricia Burgess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using the music and lives of four composers/musicians [Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten] who composed music during and after World War II, to try to understand more fully the war, the conflict of nations over power and territory, and the Holocaust, the branding of specific groups of people as less than human with the goal to exterminate them, and how the different nations thought of their legacy and the facts/truth of what occurred. “Music is time’s echo,” a way to more fully understand history and its consequences, the memory of the times, the embracing of it by deep listening to sound, a way to remember that is more powerful than words themselves, a way of keeping memory when books/words/monuments no longer suffice or disappear. “Works conceived as musical memorials do all of this actively. They request that we listen to the past through music’s ears, that we recall particular moments linked in a history of catastrophe, and that this memory then inform our choices of the values we wish to perpetuate into the future… To listen deeply to any older music in these ways is to perform an act of empathy angled toward the past. And like all acts of empathy, it takes us beyond the confines of the self, liberating us outward into the world.”

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best/worst part of this book is reading about how people approach world-changing tragedies and realising they've never been normal about it. Walther Rathenau's assassins giving their reasoning as wanting to destroy the idea of hope and the mindset of growth / bildung in the aftermath of World War I is chilling in the way it mirrors much social media nihilism today. 


Is music - art, aesthetics - an appropriate way to memorialise war and genocide, given its very personal response and its ability to be both immediate and reflective, or does it turn it into a spectacle? Eichler balances and considers this argument with the examination of the way these pieces will never be the same for any one or at the different times in history they are played. 


The story of the cowboys and ranchers driving hundreds of miles in a blizzard to premiere Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw had me weeping.

[Jadon Grove · Rating 5 out of 5]

I normally don’t read much nonfiction, but when I first learned about this book, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Eichler’s first thesis is that music (or art, more generally) is an artifact of the context it was created in. He explores it almost entirely with history about the composers of famous classical music that was either written around/during the Holocaust or in remembrance of different losses from it. His second thesis, which I call his “no such thing as a timeless masterpiece” thesis, is that music cannot float above the passage of history and the contours of life after art has been created actually shape the art itself.

The book focuses on five composers—Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, Strauss, Britten, and Shostakovich—but mentions so many more. I actually had never heard of Britten before, so I’m excited to have a new repertoire to listen to. Really such an amazing and engaging look into the intersectionality of two topics that are near and dear to me!

[Graham Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply a revelation of history, music, moment, place, distortion, people and intention. Jeremy amazes me with his historical command and confidence, yet never leaving you behind to figure out what just passed you by.

He is a deliberate guide, passionate for the story he sees and discovers, and dedicated to expounding and challenging us all.

I have rarely been able to say "I couldn't put down a work of history". I said it every time I had to put this down, but was bummed to do so.

[Summerfire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very much more a book about music than it is a book about the Holocaust. Obviously, the Holocaust was central to the artists discussed and impacted their work and their lives, but it is not about the Holocaust as such - it is about the ramifications and how these people chose to adapt and struggled with it. It's eloquent and lovely, and I love that access to the music discussed is provided.

In conclusion, fuck the Nazis and fuck the Soviets.

[John Dannehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most powerful, moving books I have ever read. We witness the creation of music through four composers (and a few others make appearances) in the face of the rise of Nazism, WWII, and the Soviet purges of the 40s and 50s. An unbelievable tribute to great men who risked much to capture Jewish identity through beautiful music in the onslaught of the Holocaust.

[Eric Boles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only music speaks to me, when others turn away their eyes

[Toby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. An entirely new way of listening to, and being immersed in, the great pieces of music.

[Michael Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read books where the author's facility with words makes for wonderful reading, and I have read books where the plot or underlying narrative is powerful and moving. It's when a book combines those two attributes that magic happens. Times Echo is one of those books.

I was drawn to the book because of the idea. Eichler's purpose with Times Echo is to tell the story of how the events of WWII and the Holocaust affected the work of four of the towering composers of the 20th century (Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich), each of whom lived through the experience. In doing so, he makes a powerful case for the music as a living eternal memorial to the fallen. But more than that, he argues that these memorials of sound convey a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust and the war. In addition, Eichler gives us a glimpse inside the political and cultural settings of each composer's homeland (including Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.) and how those societies influenced their perspective on this horrifying moment in human history.

Understanding the personal, social, and cultural circumstances of the composers proved to be far more powerful than I anticipated. To hear, for example, how Benjamin Britten's post war musical performance at a concentration camp turned displaced persons camp profoundly moved him and how it influenced and guided his brilliant War Requiem composition, gives deeper meaning to the work. Similarly, it is shocking to hear of Arnold Schoenberg's warning of impending catastrophe long before all-out war or the first indications of the Holocaust had surfaced. And it's just as moving to realize that his brilliant composition A Survivor From Warsaw received a mixed response because it served so directly as a Holocaust narrative at a time when telling the story of the Holocaust wasn't done. (As an aside, I learned quite a bit I did not know about how the Holocaust was perceived immediately following the war and how the horror of it seemed to prevent real reflection and acceptance of the depth of human evil in that moment. Perhaps we just could not face it, but the way we approach Holocaust narrative today is not what it was then).

Eichler's book tells a story of the Holocaust and the war from a perspective that I never considered. He argues that the four masterpieces he discusses are memorials that reflect their times and yet are somehow timeless. "The notion of a timeless masterpiece is deeply ingrained in the culture, and music does flout the laws of time in mysterious and near-miraculous ways. But what the poet and survivor Paul Celan wrote about a poem also holds true for a work of music: it still travels through time, and through history, to reach us - 'through it, not above and beyond it.' And a work of art cannot make this trip unscathed. The music of Beethoven, for instance, should not sound the same before and after Auschwitz."

And here I return to my original comment in this review. In addition to the power of the story, Eichler's writing is brilliant and evocative. I have not heard all of the pieces discussed in the book, and yet the language the author uses to describe the work made me feel as if I were not just listening to it, but truly inside the music. I could almost hear the rise and fall of the strings or the moment of dissonance. Eichler is a music critic (and historian) by profession, so it is not surprising that he can eloquently describe works of music. Yet, his words are transformative. Transporting the reader from where they are into a new place. One cannot ask more than this of an author.

Time's Echo is a brilliant, mournful, and deeply insightful reflection on the power of music as remembrance and offers insights into the Holocaust and the war that I had not anticipated. I very rarely give five-star reviews, reserving that rating for works that are transformative for me personally. This didn't quite reach that height; only 19 of my 790 reviews have. But it came very close. I would give this 4.75 stars. It is a brilliant work of art in its own right.

[Barbara Geffen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has received accolades galore. They're well-deserved. My husband and I read this in preparation of an author conversation with writer Franklin Foer on Zoom. The book covers compositions by 4 famous composers in the immediate aftermath of WWII, focused on the Holocaust. The premiers of their works presented the world with a musical narrative/memorial/lament/critique of the atrocities wrought on civilization by the Nazis and their personal struggles to cope with what they experienced/witnessed. As time passed, and reactions to these compositions evolved, music competed with physical testaments (or the absence of them) to the hideous actions many wanted to forget or pretend never happened. Music kept memory alive, when monuments were destroyed. I couldn't give the book five stars because I felt the author omitted any reference to Jewish composers writing music while interred in the concentration camp in Terazin, Theresienstadt. Some of that music survives, written by: Victor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas,and Ilse Weber . The Terezin composers all were ordered to compose, so that the Nazis could show the world the Camps weren't so bad after all; then they killed the composers in 1944, whose music was not meant to memorialize or criticize like the music of Shostakovich, Britten, Schoenberg, and Strauss. I believe Eichler erred by failing to mention their existence.The works of all of these composers continues to be performed. Otherwise, this book is excellent and serves as a wonderful backdrop to listening to the music whose creation stories are told within its covers.

[Eric Grunder · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be hard to find a human who hasn't experienced an ear worm: a tune that suddenly springs into the brain and plays itself like a tape on a loop again and again and again. Such experiences can be irritating. More often, they carry us back to a time past, to places and events suddenly vivid, almost real.
Such is the power of music, that most abstract of the arts.
We remember music. Music also remembers us. So argues Jeremy Eichler, chief music critic of The Boston Globe and author of Time's Echo: The Second World, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance.
In it Eichler blends cultural and musical history by examining four composers -- Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten and Shostakovich -- as the four remembered some of the horrors of World War II through their music. Readers with at least a basic knowledge of classical music and 20th century history will find this deeply researched book a delight. But even such readers likely will find themselves cracking open YouTube recordings of the music referenced.
Words on paper can never convey the effects of the music itself (Eichler sometimes resorts to such attempts, but rarely wanders too far into the music terminology weeds). And like all concert music, it must be listened to again and again before it is heard. In many ways, that's especially true of the four pieces that are the centerpiece of Eichler's book: Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, Shostakovich's Babi Ya Symphony, Britten's War Requiem, and Strauss' Metamorphosen.
The stories behind these works (and many others) that Eichler weaves throughout the book are fascinating in their own right, offering as they do a new perspective to the awful events they describe. They also serve the purpose of detailing just how intertwined art is with the history in which it was produced.
And about that history: Eichler's descriptions can be stark. To cite but one example, the 33,000 Ukrainian Jews shot by Germans in two days and bury in a ditch at Babi Yar. Shostakovich wants us to remember this. His music demands it.

The events these four works recall occurred in the second third of the 20th century, but the connective tissue making them possibly goes back decades, sometimes centuries earlier. Eichler weaves all this together in a fascinating and important look at history that too often his been ignored and too often suppressed.

These are not works likely to become ear worms. They are works worthy of knowing and appreciating. Eichler's book provides a gateway.

[Sanjuro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, really, four books rolled into one. It's a compelling history of certain aspects of WWII and the Holocaust, an analysis of certain giants of 20th century western music, a reflection on memory and memorials, and a light but effective philosophy on the role of art and its relevance to trauma. If there is anywhere where I disagreed with the book, it is only on certain aspects of this last part, on the relationship between art and trauma. Some of the reflections contained here are Eichler's own, and I did not always agree with him. But even where I disagreed, I found Eichler thoughtful, and there weren't more than 3 or 4 pages of content where I had any disagreement at all.

I found myself fascinated by the whole book, in all of its many subjects and indirect paths. However, it was some of the minor players in the story that left me the most deeply affected. I was enthralled learning more about both Mendelssohns, Alfred and Alma Rose, and Anita Lasker (who at the time I write this, is still alive, at the age of 98). The main subjects of the book were already on my radar (although I learned a lot about them here), but these other subjects were either new to me (Rose and Lasker), or I knew them but too little about them (the Mendelssohns).

The book is written luminously, so much so that it runs the risk of making a hypocrite out of its author. Eichler reasons that trauma and art have a contentious relationship, and that aestheticizing trauma creates ethical conundrums. Well, this book relays times of trauma with artistic fervor, and the prose features wonderfully artistic descriptions and turns of phrase. I've read some 1,500 books or more, and this is one of the most evocatively and beautifully written books I've ever read. This book will likely not get the wide readership it deserves, because of its niche subject matter, but I do not think a reader needs to be interested in anything less than humanity itself to enjoy the book.

[Jessica Rosner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I longed for my dad to be alive when I listened to this beautiful non fiction examination of some of the 19th and 20th century’s great composers, including Arnold Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Strauss & Benjamin Britten.
Really it is about how these men attempted to create music to memorialize both world wars while sometimes being threatened themselves with deportation or worse.
Their careers were often dependent on whichever government was in charge, creating a life and death roller coaster and accompanying emotional scars and trauma.
I am doing a poor job of describing a book that feels so monumental to me. I am not a music scholar at all, but the descriptions of the music were so intensely affecting they brought me to the playlist which contains all the music mentioned. Unhappily, many of the pieces need to be experience live, and rarely do they make it to any concert halls. Still, I can listen and absorb and imagine what went in to creating these pieces.
I wanted to talk to my father about the music, which I bet he had contained in his stash of fastidiously preserved classical records. I wanted to talk to him about whether he liked the twelve tone music compositions of Schoenberg, how he felt about Strauss trying to appease the Nazi party and then becoming a pariah to his former friends.
Listening to this book while at the same time reading the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, which includes passages about WW1, I felt immersed in that time.
Scholarly as it is I was able to understand and follow all of it, and it leaves me wanting more, as is always the case with a truly great book.
Thank you Jeremy Eichler.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

(full disclosure: I read the first 82 pages and the final 6 pages of this book's 296 pages of text; after the text there are almost 100 pages of notes, index, illustration credits; my reasons for stopping are given below)

I heard part of an interview with the author given in the fall of 2023 on public radio days ago (fall 2024) about this book and was very moved. The interview included musical excerpts which could be one way to enhance the reading, though the many illustrations in the book are helpful too. Cultural historian and music critic Eichler eventually focuses on composers Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten, but he begins with the backgrounds of musicians in the 1800s and with history's and memory's interactions with nations and art and religious attitudes. Eichler is a superb writer and is deft at weaving together the many strands of culture. (GoodReads has the excellent and eloquent review by Martha Anne Toll from "The Washington Post," October 2, 2023.)

I would like to read the whole of this book in a few years while listening to excerpts of the music discussed. But reading it in the runup to the USA 2024 presidential election with the "othering" and misinformation that is similar to Hitler's buildup to power and "othering" is just too much. So not now.