There’s a longer, 6400-word version of this review, which I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to completely wrangle into shape. I’ve been trying now for four days, and seriously, I would like to get on to something else. At times it is positively brutal, not so much because of my tone, which I tried my best to moderate, but because of my honest, detailed, factual reporting, with ample evidence of the sheer number of mistakes, the poor writing, and the shameful quality of the editing.
The source of my agony has been Tim Greiving’s epic biography of John Williams (“John Williams: A Composer’s Life”), released by Oxford University Press in September. I was overjoyed to receive it for Christmas. Little did I realize I’d unwrapped 630 pages of quicksand.
I compiled the bulk of my report over two days this month, separated by a couple of weeks. My mood evidently shifted, as the two halves do not flow together. Here, I do my best to restore the paragraphs I set down on Day 1, which are much kinder, if more broadly argued.
*****
The author is at his worst when he goes purple or wades into simile and metaphor. He’s simply too imprecise, random, and just plain sloppy. The book reads like a first draft, and I am shocked that Oxford University Press would allow anything like this to go to print. And yet it has turned up on holiday gift lists and year’s top recommendations from many reputable sources. Am I taking crazy pills? Or are people simply not equipped to recognize good prose anymore?
The internet has had the effect of tearing down the old guard of gatekeepers and leveled the playing field, but I’ve been around long enough – and I’m not THAT old – to remember when, if you were going to be published, you had to be able to write well enough that a reader isn’t made to stop every few sentences to think about what’s wrong with what he or she just read. When I read a published book, I expect polished prose, not a high school essay that keeps shifting tones and tenses, repeats itself, mixes metaphors, and commits any number of actual malaprops.
I do a lot of reading in bed. Since I knew I wanted to post my observations on this book, I kept a tablet and pen on my nightstand. Little did I expect that I would be having to put down the book and pick up the pen so often, frequently multiple times per page. Some nights, if I felt I just wanted to enjoy reading for a change, I had to stifle the impulse. But on those nights, I could feel the perspiration beading on my brow. By no means did I chronicle every error in the book, but even in my sporadic effort I managed to accumulate eight double-sided pages.
There are the bones of a good book here, and the author obviously loves his subject. There are times when he’s so confessional, as in the acknowledgments section at the end, that he actually moves me. But he needed a genuine editor, not to get the length down – I think the world deserves a 600-page John Williams biography – but rather to tame the prose, to whack the weeds and bring some order and to get everything looking professional and consistent, to lend it the feel of authoritativeness it deserves. Because for as shoddily-written as it is, it will remain an important resource for anyone who truly cares about the composer, beyond the casual fan’s ten favorite soundtracks.
I hasten to add, the book as an object is beyond reproach, very handsomely produced, with an attractive dustjacket, a glossy photo section, and quality paper that, under reasonable conditions, is not likely to yellow within a few years, unlike so many books these days. Perhaps the font could have been a little larger and the margins a little more generous, but these things didn’t really bother me once I got used to them. The alternatives probably would have added another hundred pages. Perhaps more? How many more pages would Oxford University Press allow, anyway?
I strongly suspect that Greiving, in common with many film music “scholars,” possesses a very limited knowledge of classical music (from which, as he himself astutely observes, the language of Hollywood film music evolved). I’d even go further to speculate that he doesn’t know all that much about music in general, at least in terms of how it is ordinarily written about and discussed, and not only in the academic literature. I am by no means a pointy-headed, jargon-bandying university type. I am speaking of the proper application of terms like “orchestrations,” for instance, which the author seems to use often as a synonym for “works” or “compositions.”
I don’t doubt he has an extensive knowledge of film music and composers, as I always have, but I’m afraid it may all come down to the enthusiastic absorption and retention of trivia, statistics, and history. I am not denigrating those things in themselves. I am merely pointing out that there is an awkwardness to some of the music writing that would not exist had the author more experience reading about orchestral music in periodicals or books that deal with the subject. This shortcoming does not wreck Greiving’s book, but it does unfortunately draw attention to itself. Repeatedly.
There are times when the author pulls himself together and the writing becomes less turgid or juvenile and he makes some very astute points. And at those moments, I say to myself, “Yes!” But my god, man, I wish that someone with some experience reading actual books had sat down and proofread this thing. Such a handsomely produced volume and such an ambitious undertaking, with a major artistic and pop cultural figure as its subject, should have been one of the year’s best books.
Astonishingly, it was included on many such lists – which makes me a little sad for the world, that our editing and publishing would be in the hands of such amateurs. There were many times in the course of my reading that I really, really hoped my own writing doesn’t come across like this to older readers of more experience, who lived through an era of higher standards.
*****
Anyway, this is not complete or polished, but it’s something, a fragment that touches on some of the issues I had with the book, so that I can get this off my desk and get back to posting again. What a logjam!
Maybe I’ll share the longer version, or fragments of it, next week. That’s the one with all the actual, painful examples, but it’s also full of specifics about Williams himself and what I found commendable about the book, alongside what I found so very frustrating. The last thing I want is for it to come across as a public flogging. One of the reasons I hesitate is that I’m afraid if I post it as it is, there’s going to be a lot of painful stripes.
Grieving deserves all respect for undertaking such a project, and clearly it was a labor of love. Frankly, the book should never have gone to print in the condition it’s in. And that’s all on Oxford University Press. A good editor could have worked miracles on it and ensured the book and its author looked their very best.
If there’s ever a second edition, Tim, I am here for you. Don’t hesitate to message me.
Category: Book Reviews
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Caught in My Own Web: Tangled Up in Indignation Over Tim Greiving’s John Williams Bio
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William Saroyan and Jean Sibelius
I’d forgotten what a terrific writer William Saroyan is. As someone who has haunted, worked in, and owned bookstores throughout his life, of course I had encountered Saroyan’s name and gleaned from some of his titles that he was proud of his Armenian heritage.
But what drove me finally to seek out his work was a viewing on TCM some years ago of a moving wartime drama called “The Human Comedy,” in which Mickey Rooney, surely giving one of his best performances, plays a high school student who moonlights as a telegraph delivery boy, helping to support his family after the death of his father, while his brother is away at war.
The cast also includes Frank Morgan (a.k.a. The Wizard of Oz), Donna Reed in one of her early roles, and Van Johnson, who for once doesn’t annoy the hell out of me. It’s a heartwarming film that delivers. A really beautiful slice of Americana. Sentimental? At times, but I think its tears are well earned. There’s an awful lot of “aw shucks” wholesomeness, but I’m not against that. I don’t know if I’d put it on the same shelf as “The Best Years of Our Lives” or “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it definitely exudes that same quasi-mythic sense of community and basic American decency.
Saroyan himself didn’t like what Hollywood did with the film, but he was, after all, the writer and understandably proprietary. Also, he had been nudged out of the director’s chair by Louis B. Mayer, after it was found Saroyan’s original screenplay would have pushed the running time to 4 hours. In response, Saroyan went home and immediately adapted his treatment into a novel, which was rushed into publication before the film could be completed and became a runaway bestseller.
It’s always been a bit of a mindbender for me to realize that so many of these figures who attained success during the 1930s and ‘40 were still basically middle-aged by the time they reached the 1970s. It’s crazy, for instance, to think that my grandfather, who served in World War II, turned 60 in 1975. So it was that I always thought of Saroyan as the outlandlishly mustachioed celebrity he was at the time he appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show” (with Veronica Lake and Leonard Maltin) in 1971. It’s hard to reconcile it with the handsome, dark-eyed, alternately exuberant and melancholy, earthy and unwaveringly independent writer of the 1930s and ‘40s.
Once upon a time, Saroyan was taken very seriously as a major voice in American fiction. He wrote acclaimed novels, plays, and short stories. And the power and personality of his individual voice never aged. It is still potent in the story collections he tossed off late in life, if perhaps tempered by accrued wisdom (but not always). At times, he can be positively Vonnegutesque, so I suppose it should have come as no surprise to learn that Vonnegut wrote a tribute to Saroyan that was delivered at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters the year after Saroyan’s death in 1981. Vonnegut, who had never met the man but clearly admired his work, characterized Saroyan as “the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists.”
On the last day of a Princeton Public Library book sale in October, I returned to run my eye over the picked-over inventory to see what I might have missed and maybe pick up a few deals from among the orphans during the half-price closeout. Imagine my delight, when I espied a crisp, leather-bound Franklin Library edition of Saroyan’s “Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” from 1976, with illustrations by Al Hirschfeld, marked $10 – $5 half-price. This was especially exciting as it happened to contain Saroyan’s account of his meeting with Jean Sibelius. Sibelius, of course, is one of my favorite composers. He was born on this date in 1865.
Somehow, at some point, I had learned about this literary anecdote and have had my eyes open for “Jean Sibelius at Home in Jaarvenpaa” [sic] ever since. Basically, the writer at 27 pops into a record shop in Helsinki in 1935 and requests a recording of “Finlandia,” a piece of music with which he had come to strongly identify for personal, as opposed to nationalistic, reasons. The clerk pulls a performance and puts it on a turntable, and the two listen transfixed. Reading his enthusiasm, the clerk insists on calling up the composer to ask if it would be okay for Saroyan to drop by. The account is especially interesting in that it offers a bit of a counterpoint to the usual portraits of Sibelius as a solemn recluse.
Here, he’s hospitable and good-humored. Saroyan is surprised by the composer’s “boyish and boisterous courtesy” and whisky is consumed. (Saroyan, however, declines the offer of a fine cigar.) But it isn’t long before he detects a sorrowful undercurrent in his host’s character that he recognizes from another of his personal favorite pieces by the composer, the “Elegie” from “King Christian II,” which the writer references in at least two other stories in the collection.
The meeting grows awkward as Saroyan mentions “Valse triste,” one of Sibelius’ most successful works, but one for which the composer was screwed out of enormous royalties, thanks to an early agreement with his publisher. In the silence that follows, Saroyan is glad to have retained a taxi, which is waiting for him outside. Still, he is so buoyed by the experience of meeting Jean Sibelius that he decides to write a story about it as soon as he gets back to his room. This he also calls “Finlandia.”
It was only in reading “Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” last week that I learned of the existence of this earlier Sibelius-related short story. This I have been unsuccessful in obtaining prior to the writing of this post. It appeared in Saroyan’s book “Inhale and Exhale” and was subsequently collected in “The William Saroyan Reader.” Sadly, I could find neither on the shelves of Princeton’s Labyrinth Books or Barnes & Noble (no Saroyan represented at either store, as a matter of fact), and the Princeton Public Library only had “The Human Comedy” and “My Name is Aram.” So I have a copy of “The William Saroyan Reader” on order from a seller on eBay.
(Parenthetically, at some point within the last few years I also picked up a good used copy of “My Name is Aram,” which I had passed over many times, even when I had it on the shelf in one of my own shops, not realizing how very interested I would be to read it until my conversion experience with “The Human Comedy.” That said, I have yet to get around to it. It’s in one of the stacks on my desk.)
“Sons Come and Go, Mother’s Hang in Forever” is a like a collection of vignettes, entertaining free-associations spanning some three or four pages recollecting some aspect of Saroyan’s world, whether it be his boyhood in Fresno, his experiences in Hollywood in the 1930s, or the sights and sounds of New York City’s 57th Street. Some of the other artists and celebrities of whom Saroyan records his impressions include Jack Benny, Paul Bowles, Marc Chagall, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, Ernest Hemingway, Miriam Hopkins, Walter Huston, Gypsy Rose Lee, H.L. Mencken, Marilyn Monroe, George Jean Nathan, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, George Bernard Shaw, George Stevens, Gloria Swanson, and Darryl Zanuck (with a cameo by Humphrey Bogart). And he doesn’t pull any punches. If he finds someone lacking, he lets you know. He really didn’t like Will Rogers or Harold Clurman or Louis B. Mayer. Mostly, though, he’s pretty genial and matter-of-fact, often with a touch of empathy, or at any rate, humanity glowing beneath the surface.
I have since discovered that Sibelius is not the only classical composer with whom Saroyan had associated. He also collaborated with American composer Alan Hovhaness, who shared his Armenian ancestry. (Hovhaness was also an ardent Sibelius enthusiast, who kept up a correspondence with the Finnish master.) Together, they wrote the song “Bari, Bari” and Hovhaness composed incidental music for Saroyan’s play “Jim Dandy.” After Saroyan’s death in 1981, half his ashes were interred in the Komitas Pantheon in Armenia near the grave of Aram Khachaturian, whose artistry Saroyan had also lauded. Komitas himself is celebrated as the founder of an Armenian national school of music.
Clearly, Saroyan possessed a fierce ethnic pride, but the United States, after all, was the country of his birth, and despite early hardship (his mother was so poor that after his father died he lived in an orphanage for five years), he loved America, and he wrote warmly about the people of different ethnicities and backgrounds he grew up with.
For reasons he perhaps never fully understood, he felt a close affinity with Sibelius, living in the remote north, “a giant in the world, and not just the world of music, a giant in the world of mystery, of legend, of universal human meanings.”
A roundabout salute, then, to Jean Sibelius on the 160th anniversary of his birth!
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Sibelius, “Elegy” from incidental music to “King Christian II”
Alan Hovhaness, “Bari, Bari”
Selection from Hovhaness’ incidental music to Saroyan’s “Jim Dandy”
Veronica Lake and William Saroyan on Dick Cavett
“Finlandia”
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Evenings with Hector Berlioz: Music, Scorn, and Genius
“Music makes herself beautiful and charming for those who love and respect her; she has nothing but scorn and contempt for those who sell her.” Only one of the many quotable observations in Hector Berlioz’s “Evenings with the Orchestra.”
I’ve been reluctant to try to encapsulate this book, which I finished weeks ago, in preparation for this year’s Bard Music Festival. “Hector Berlioz and His World” will begin on Friday at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. (For more information, see the link below.)
Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry memorably observed, “To define is to limit,” and there is something about this book – like Berlioz himself – that defies limitation. It’s every bit as much of a chimera as the composer’s most ambitious music. Satire, autobiography, music criticism, sociology, aesthetic philosophy, slapstick comedy, parable, historical romance, science fiction, and grand guignol form a curious menagerie, startling as the wonders of Dr. Lao’s circus parade.
The tales and framing device provide glimpses into the composer’s life, his encounters with musicians great and poor, his intense love affairs raising him on wings to heaven, only to dash him in the other place, his observations on a beleaguered art in a hopelessly flawed and vulgar world, and his impressions of what he perceives as our very greatest and worst music.
At times, these take on a fantastical element. The composer projects his criticisms of the current state of the art, circa 1850, five hundred years into the future, to an authoritarian, Gluck-worshipping society, complete with air ships like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I kept expecting Raymond Massey to show up in his massive “Things to Come” helmet. In one of the interludes, things turn unexpectedly gruesome, rivaling the most horrifying episode in Edgar Allan Poe. In another, we learn of composer William Vincent Wallace’s erotic adventures among the cannibals of New Zealand.
We are introduced to the microcosm of the opera house, with its vainglorious tenors, who treat music scores like so many hangers on which to display their gaudy clothes; impresarios who know little about, and care nothing for, the integrity of the works they present; and the routine rough handling, arbitrary cuts, and clumsy alterations to which even the greatest operas are routinely subjected.
Furthermore, Berlioz seldom allows an opportunity to pass with which he can use to illustrate what a bunch of idiots the wider public are. Yes, even back then.
The overarching conceit has the narrator (Berlioz or an alter ego) visit the pit of a foreign opera house, where most of the musicians are shown to quickly lose interest in whatever jejune trifle they’re given to perform, dismiss whatever imbecilities transpire onstage, and pass the time gossiping and exchanging the anecdotes and stories that become the bases of the various chapters of the book.
There are notable exceptions. Whenever the works of Gluck or Weber find their way onto the music stands, they play as if they are handing down Holy Scripture.
A recurring target is the overzealous bass drummer. Berlioz makes no secret of his disgust with the vulgarity of most Italian opera, especially Rossini; but he is no easier on the French, at one point offering an ostensible – albeit extensive – review of a new opera by Adolphe Adam that, beyond a few sentences at the end, is really mostly an account of Berlioz’s weekend in the country. This review originally appeared in a Paris newspaper. As you can imagine, there was no love lost between the two composers.
We also learn about the political maneuverings of the claques, factions paid off by impresarios and singers to applaud and cheer, with the aim of bolstering the reputations of performers and the successes of new productions.
Also, about “tacks,” when conductors take to rapping their batons on nearby objects to attract the attention of musicians. According to Berlioz, or the narrator, in one case, the maddening repetition of the act against a resonant box at the foot of the stage, night after night, drove the prompter who worked inside finally to commit suicide.
Episodes like these excite with their lurid interest. However, they are interleaved with panegyrics to Berlioz’s favored musicians (Spontini, Gluck, Weber, Paganini), and some of these, I have to admit, can go on for quite some time. They provide their own sort of interest, but after a while, they can get to be a little challenging for a reader burning the midnight oil. When Berlioz warms to a subject, he can waffle on about it for a good 30 pages. For great stretches, he can be amusing, occasionally even laugh-out-loud funny, but I must say, for me personally, “Evenings with the Orchestra” is not bedtime reading. I made much surer progress when I picked it up during the day. If you want a good Berlioz bedtime book, stick with the “Memoirs.” Its shorter chapters lend it a brisker pace.
Whatever the composer writes, it is invariably full of personality. This book, more than most, really conveys quite vividly that nothing in human nature ever really changes – even without the author projecting 500 years in the future. I can totally relate to the types and personalities involved, and the composer’s frustrations, but also, thankfully, his sense of the ridiculous.
I conclude by reminding you that the Bard Music Festival, “Berlioz and His World,” will take place at Bard College from August 9-18. You’ll find a complete schedule of concerts and more information at the link.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/
Fisher Center at Bard
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Anne Brontë’s “Wildfell Hall”: A Tormented Valentine
On Sunday, I finally completed Anne Brontë’s ‘’The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” – all blessed 489 pages of it – successfully wrapping up my third consecutive, tormented year with the Brontës for Valentine’s Day.
First of all, let me say there doesn’t seem to have been a weak link between the Brontë sisters, in regard to their respective talents as writers. Indeed, since the sisters published under pseudonyms (Currer Bell for Charlotte, Ellis Bell for Emily, and Acton Bell for Anne), it was often speculated, early on, that the three were the same person. So perhaps there’s a powerful argument to be made for growing up in comparative isolation and having to make your own entertainment, with only your siblings, the moors, a good library, and a single, working father with progressive ideas about freedom and a sound education to sustain you. Being the offspring of a minister also ensured a fluency in recalled bible passages, which are alluded to frequently throughout the Brontës’ writings, not least in “Wildfell Hall.”
For me, the great weakness of Anne’s novel (her second, after “Agnes Grey”) is in its structure. So compelling is the book’s miserable second act, that it makes the framing device, especially the ending, seem almost precious by comparison. Loosely epistolary in nature (employing a narrative device of telling the story through letters and journal entries), the novel conveys its information to the reader through two of its central characters. And one of them, the panting George Markham, is as problematic in his way as the rakish Arthur Huntingdon. Is he really any more a fulfilling match for Helen than her husband (abusive S.O.B. that he is)?
To be fair, in the passages narrated by Markham, the character’s obsessive, frequently cloying, quasi-adolescent protestations of love for Helen are understandably central to his thoughts; but how often does he actually think about HER? Whereas Helen, with all her suffering, comes across as someone of much greater substance. She certainly displays more resilience in a society where the rules are stacked against women, whose fortunes, in all senses, are basically tied up with their husbands or fathers. If a woman winds up in a bad marriage, she’s stuck, and Helen marries a monster.
But face it, that’s why we love the Brontës, for the tempest-tossed heroines who can’t seem to resist the storm. Unfortunately, Arthur possesses neither the wounded nobility of Rochester nor the demonic fury of Heathcliff. Nor, sadly, does George. What compels is Helen’s degradation in an isolated, loveless, often empty mansion. I suppose it’s a metaphor to some extent for her unrequited love for a scoundrel who is in no way worthy of it.
The first act reads almost like a Jane Austen novel, with all the gossip and social maneuverings of a rural community of farmers, clergymen, and gentlefolk. The third is a pat, precious denouement. But it is in the long central portion, which doesn’t begin until about 150 pages in, in which Helen Huntingdon tells the tale of her harrowing marriage to the scapegrace Arthur (via her journal), that “Wildfell Hall” becomes so horribly compelling, as the narrator details the mounting degradation and hopelessness of her union.
This is my fourth Bronte novel, actually, having read Charlotte’s “Shirley” a little over 30 years ago, when taking a graduate course on the Victorian novel. In her way, Helen has been received as a cutting-edge feminist, within the strictures of the Victorian social order, as would be Charlotte’s heroine. (Formerly the name Shirley had had masculine associations; that changed largely with the success of Charlotte’s novel, which was published in 1849, the year after “Wildfell Hall.”) But Helen’s options are sadly few. The extent of her power is that she can close a door against her husband and harbor plans, with few resources, to escape in the night. Talk about you’ve come a long way, baby!
She’s more resourceful than that, actually, as she also figures out a way to earn her own meager living – for as unlikely a means of financial sustenance as it is.
Helen’s got courage and resolve to burn, but the depths of her strength are truly revealed in a decision she makes in the second half of the book that illustrates her extraordinary selflessness, forgiveness, and grace, especially after having been treated so poorly, and under conditions in which she essentially risks everything.
I hate to use such a trendy label as “toxic masculinity,” but all the “gentlemen” seem to do in this book is hunt, gamble, carouse, and intimidate. At one point, even Markham, the “nice” alternative to Arthur, jealously brains a rival (who later turns out to be more than he seems).
Am I glad I read it? Sure! I’d probably rank it below Emily’s “Wuthering Heights,” if only because of the insane twistedness of the latter’s characters and narrative. Anne certainly wants for nothing, in terms of writing ability and insight, but the character of Arthur never achieves the magnetic Byronism of Heathcliff – not that that was necessarily her aim. That said, for me, Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” is still the champ, wholly satisfying as the quintessential gothic romance.
Of the three, “Wildfell Hall” is the most unflinching in its realism. The sisters had plenty of first-hand experience with the trials and tribulations of debauchery, through the dissipation of their brother, Branwell. What’s remarkable is that Anne so well understood the wider social and romantic intricacies of the world beyond the parsonage. If the Brontës are anything to go by, finding employment as a governess must be very good training for a writer.
Interestingly, Charlotte was not a big fan of “Wildfell Hall.” The siblings all died early: Emily in 1848 at 30, Anne in 1849 at 29, and Charlotte in 1855 at 38. Charlotte survived the longest, and she was not timid in her criticism of “Wildfell Hall.” She even went so far as to suppress its republication. When the book did appear again, the text was abridged and mutilated, and like the character of Helen herself, was subjected to even further indignities over the years. So do be cautious, if you’re shopping for a copy, even if it’s advertised as “complete and unabridged!”
According to an afternote in my edition, a clothbound hardcover from Penguin Classics, the author’s personal copy of the first edition, with her handwritten notes and annotations, is housed at Princeton University Library (although there is some question as to whether or not the marginalia is in fact hers).
Classic Ross Amico, reading the world’s classics, so you don’t have to!
Now it’s well past time for me to sit down with a pad of paper and a biography of one of the key, though largely unsung, American instrumentalists of the 20th century, for an upcoming project I’m supposed to participate in, in earnest, beginning next week…
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Time’s Echo: Music as Living History
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]
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