Echo of Time

In 1785, the great German poet Friedrich Schiller wrote “Ode to Joy” and embodied in it the most cherished dreams of the European Enlightenment. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony gave wings to Schiller's words, but a century later, the same “Ode to Joy” was weaponized by Nazi propagandists and distorted beyond recognition. When it comes to how society remembers these increasingly distant catastrophes, history books, archives, documentaries, and memorials carved from stone come to mind. Jeremy Eichler invites us to listen to the musical compositions that serve as memorials to World War II. The author passionately and candidly argues for the power of music as a cultural memory, an art form capable of carrying the meaning of the past. The author shows how four remarkable composers—Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten—experienced the era of World War II and the Holocaust, and then embodied their experiences in deeply moving, transcendent musical works that echo the lost time. Eichler is tireless and inventive: he draws on the testimonies of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians, and ordinary people. He shows how an entire era was encoded in these sounds and the fates of the composers. Eichler visited key sites related to the creation of music—from the ruins of the cathedral in Coventry to the ravine of Babyn Yar in Kyiv. As the living memory of World War II fades, “Echo of Time” offers new ways to listen to and hear history. Recognizing in this music the echoes of what another era heard, wrote about, dreamed of, hoped for, and mourned. This book, filled with lyricism and compassion for its heroes, prompts us to reflect on the legacy of war, on the presence of the past in our present lives.