Whenever I’m ambling around a bookstore, especially one that deals exclusively in new books (as opposed to used bookshops, which are always my preference), I’ll come to the music section and be reminded of the impoverished state of our culture, as I stare into a wall full of glossy flip-books about vapid pop stars. If I’m lucky, there will be perhaps one shelf devoted to classical music, and on that shelf perhaps one or two volumes worth my while, and I’ve usually already read them.

Thankfully, and I don’t know how, the tradition of writing and publishing thoughtful, carefully researched music books persists, even if they are seldom stocked or displayed at the local sausage factory. In fairness, I did see a copy of Jeremy Eichler’s “Time’s Echo” at the area Barnes & Noble. But I had already received it as a surprise Christmas gift after having first encountered it at the local independent shop, Labyrinth Books Princeton.

When I first read the subtitle, “The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance,” I totally expected it to be a book about music written in the concentration camps or by composers who were interned there. But I was way off the mark.

Opening it at random and simply dipping into a passage about Mendelssohn’s standing in the hearts of the German public, even after a commemorative statue was melted down for munitions by the Nazis in accordance with their racial laws – Mendelssohn, raised without religion, was descended from the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, though he himself was baptized into the Reformed Christian church – was enough to make me realize the broader scope of Eichler’s intent. (The statue, it turns out, returns in the book’s epilogue.)

Among other things, the book traces the idealistic history of “Bildung,” in which we learn, during a century or so of liberalization, Jews were permitted to leave the ghettos to assimilate, flourish, and enrich German society and culture in a spirit of universal brotherhood. According to Eichler, “‘Bildung’ signifies the ideal of personal ennoblement through humanistic education, 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. …The life of dignity implicitly promised by ‘Bildung’ was open to all, regardless of one’s origins (that is, of course, as long as one was male).” Progress comes incrementally. But that’s the thing. Society claws its way slowly, slowly toward the light, and then come the hammer blows of war and hatred and fascism to knock it all down. The quashing of hope is heartbreaking.

The narrative begins with the indelible image of “Goethe’s Oak,” the tree under which tradition holds the great German poet once gazed out over a lush valley of promise and declared, “Here a person feels great and free… the way he should always be.” Ironically, a little over a century later, the oak is the only living thing to have been spared in clearing a forest to make way for the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In a later chapter, Eichler relates the chilling history of Babi Yar, the site of a former ravine in Kyiv used as an execution site and mass grave by the Nazis. 30,000 Jews were killed there, the body count swollen to 100,000, when the remains of murdered Jews and other undesirables were transported from other parts of the Soviet Union – the site then obliterated by the Soviet authorities, whose policy it was to obfuscate, distort, and deny history. In the end, they could change the landscape, but they couldn’t kill the memory.

However, as Eichler reminds us, with the passage of time, atrocities like Babi Yar and the wider suffering of two World Wars will no longer be the stuff of lived experience. The sense of immediacy will inevitably fade into the past, distilled into so many dates and statistics on a dry page. Even memoirs are experienced at a remove. We can read about the horrors and the misery, and we may empathize, but necessarily it will always be at a distance.

“Time’s Echo” discusses four composers who actually lived through the era and specific examples from their work that stand as enduringly vibrant monuments to those dark times. Eichler argues that close listening to these musical memorials can provide an aural and emotional record of the horrors of war and the Holocaust, with an immediacy that allows the listener a greater comprehension of the enormity of the world’s turmoil and its emotional toll.

I hasten to add, in case I give the impression that the book dwells in darkness, there is also plenty of hope and humanity on display.

Eichler writes of the touching friendship between Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten, separated by some 1700 miles, and an Iron Curtain, but who bonded over music – Shostakovich declaring Britten’s “War Requiem” the greatest work of the 20th century and Britten returning Shostakovich’s admiration, most recently for the latter’s Symphony No. 13 (subtitled “Babi Yar”).

Shostakovich composed “Babi Yar” on texts of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who dared to speak truth to power – for a time, anyway; the poems were soon toned down, but Shostakovich held fast to the originals. The work stirred great controversy with the authorities (by then under Krushchev), who tried to intimidate everyone involved with the work’s first performance. There are plenty of anecdotes in the book to illustrate the constant terror artists experienced living in the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin. Shostakovich dedicated his next symphony, the Symphony No. 14, another work for vocal soloists and orchestra, to Britten, who conducted the work’s UK premiere.

Shostakovich, who was not Jewish, nevertheless possessed a vast well of empathy for the oppressed. As one who was frequently targeted himself, he knew a thing or two about terror and suffering. He closely identified with the Jewish people, had many Jewish friends and associates, and stuck out his neck time and again in advocating for them in his music, both implicitly and explicitly, assimilating Jewish folk tunes and poems into his works. He also did what he could to shield composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg from official persecution. Weinberg’s father-in-law, actor Solomon Mikhoels, who was enlisted to help disseminate the truth about Babi Yar, was lured into an alley and assassinated; his death was ruled a traffic accident.

It’s easy to see how Britten, as a pacifist and a homosexual – either “offense” which could have landed him in jail – would have found further sympathy with Shostakovich. Both men were outsiders and both had to be very careful in their dealings with the system. Conversely, both connected profoundly with the wider public. It’s hard to imagine any composer’s death today inspiring the kind of turnout or displays of respect both received at their funerals. (Shostakovich died in 1975 and Britten died in 1976.) Britten, who was granted conscientious objector status in 1943, gained first-hand experience of the camps when he insisted on accompanying violinist Yehudi Menuhin as pianist in a recital for displaced survivors at the liberated Bergen-Belsen. It was an experience that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

You will also emerge from the book with a greater affection for Arnold Schoenberg. The dour high priest of dodecaphonic music was actually a real mensch, a passionate humanitarian, even if touchingly blinkered by his idealism. His cantata “A Survivor of Warsaw” proved so disturbing in 1947, with its uncompromising text relating the barbarity of a concentration camp, complete with beatings and gas chambers, that nobody knew what to do with it. More disturbing was a willful silence surrounding many of the atrocities committed against Jews, in particular, that was upheld seemingly everywhere. Incredibly, the work was first performed by a company of cowboys and farmhands, who mastered not only the twelve-tone idiom but Hebrew for its first performance – in Albuquerque, New Mexico! – in 1948. It’s a great story, and a welcome human interlude, well-related in the book.

Schoenberg was the polar opposite of Richard Strauss, who could be calculated and cynical, but nonetheless loved the arts and believed in tradition, to the extent that he thought he could uphold and preserve Germany’s proud cultural history by tacitly playing ball with the Nazis. All too soon, he realized he was in over his head. Strauss was no Nazi himself, but in convincing himself he was above politics and that the current regime would surely pass, he made unfortunate decisions that left him morally compromised. He was also politically compromised, as he quietly continued to collaborate with Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, and he did not suffer fools quietly. His intercepted correspondence, full of acid remarks about the idiots in charge, put him on the outs with Hitler, even as he was held up to the world as a paragon of German superiority. In the end, it was all he could do to keep his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren out of the camps. He could not save the rest of his daughter-in-law’s family. (He tried; he went so far as to visit the camp himself, but was turned away.)

“Metamorphosen,” composed in 1945, has long been understood as Strauss’ elegy to bombed out Munich, its opera house, a symbol of German art, the site of so many formative cultural experiences and later personal successes, now in ruins. Eichler delves into the work’s deeper significance and enigmas, even as he runs up against resistance from an uncooperative Strauss estate.

The book is built on a foundation of scholarship (with ample pages of notes and attributions listed in an appendix), but is by no means a dry, academic treatise. It is not crammed with impenetrable jargon. This is a book written with the general reader in mind. It’s an engrossing piece of history rendered in absorbing prose. If you are familiar with and enjoy the books of Alex Ross, you will find this at least as rewarding. (Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker; Eichler is chief classical music critic for the Boston Globe.)

The book is certainly thought-provoking, even if a lot of the philosophical meditations the author inspires have been churning around my head at least since the time I became conscious of having an intellect. That’s not to say Eichler doesn’t provide fresh perspectives. Nor is it to say I agree with all of his conclusions. I do believe it’s possible to listen to music composed before the horrors of the 20th century and to be able to meet it on its own terms, and that in so doing a work such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is still more than simply “freedom kitsch.” Music from the past still has plenty to offer us in the considerable enrichment of our lives, and from many perspectives.

But I also believe that not only do great works of art “change” over the course of the life of anyone who experiences them (how could we not view the world differently as we learn more and continue to evolve as people?), I agree with Eichler that they can also be viewed differently as a result of their continued and inexorable progress through the creep of history.

Eichler is at his best when he characterizes music as aural history, with the experiences and emotions of an artist and an era frozen in amber, and demonstrates how careful listening allows us to experience these sensations anew. While the author scores point after point, he feeds us no pat answers. He provokes thought and inspires conversation, right up to the sense of ambiguity he leaves us with as he encounters the reconstituted Mendelssohn statue at the end of the book.

“Time’s Echo” is highly recommended for anyone who’s bothered to wade through this post to this point – especially so if you happen to be interested in four masters of 20th century music, WWII history, the Holocaust, how the past continues to inform the present, and how music parallels and supplements the written word as a vessel of history and persists as a living document of the human experience. Read it now, and thank me later.

[Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Fall 2023]