Time's Echo

Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" was written in 1785 and voiced the Enlightenment's hope for a future of peace and freedom in which all people would stand as equals. Beethoven gave those lines musical form in his Ninth Symphony, yet not even a century later Nazi propagandists had seized the same words and bent them toward a barbarism so total that, in one philosopher's view, it tore apart the basic solidarity binding all human beings.

When societies try to remember such distant hopes and catastrophes, they usually turn to history books, archives, documentaries, and monuments of stone. Jeremy Eichler, an award-winning critic and cultural historian, argues that music may be the most powerful of these vehicles, an art form able to carry meaning from the past into the present. Combining a critic's ear, a scholar's depth of knowledge, and a novelist's attention to detail, he follows four composers, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten, who lived through the Second World War and the Holocaust and later shaped those experiences into works whose scores seem to echo lost time. Eichler draws on the testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians, and ordinary people to show how the character of an entire era came to be encoded in these sounds and the stories around them.

The book also takes readers to places central to the creation of this music, including the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. As the living memory of the Second World War fades, Eichler proposes new ways of listening to history, learning to hear in the music the resonances of what earlier generations wrote, imagined, hoped for, and grieved. It will appeal to readers interested in the aftermath of war, the persistence of the past, and the continuing role of art in contemporary life.