Time's Echo

June 15, 2023
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.

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Starred review from June 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.

Starred review from July 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

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