Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War
Author: Jeremy Eichler
Publisher: Vintage Books A Division of Penguin Random House LLC, softcover, 386 pages, including: Prelude, Part I, Part II, Coda, Acknowledgements, Notes, and Index
Reviewed by Rev. Garth Wehrfritz-Hanson
Contents
Part I contains Chapter One: Emancipating Music; Chapter Two: Dancing in the Thorns; Chapter Three: Torn Halves; Chapter Four: Beneath the Waves; Chapter Five: The Emancipation of Memory; Chapter Six: Moses in Albuquerque; Part II contains Chapter Seven: From the Other Shore; Chapter Eight: Angels of History; Chapter Nine: The Light of Final Moments; Chapter Ten: Monuments; Coda: Listening to Lost Time.
The Author
Jeremy Eichler is a writer, scholar, critic, and educator, and served as chief classical music critic for The Boston Globe. He teaches music history and public humanities at Tuft University. He earned his PhD in modern European history at Columbia University.
Brief Observations
In his Prelude: In the Shade of the Oak, Eichler contrasts the tragic irony of Germany’s great poet, Goethe enjoying a banquet-like breakfast in the shade of an oak tree, where the Nazis built the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Eichler also states in the Prelude: “The role of music in particular as an “unconscious chronicle”--as a witness to history and as a carrier of memory for a post-Holocaust world—is the subject of this book” (p. 7).
The author focusses, in particular, on these four composers: Arnold Schoenberg and his A Survivor from Warsaw, Richard Strauss and his Metamorphosen, Benjamin Britten and his War Requiem, and Dmitri Shostakovich and his Babi Yar. Eichler provides some of the social, political and musical contexts that influenced these four composers and their works. He also goes into detail explaining and analyzing the four compositions, and cites other art, music, and cultural pundits, politicians, and others who commented on the four works—indeed, there are some fairly extensive citations in this volume. Eichler also personally interviewed people such as Shostakovich’s third wife. Thus a substantial amount of research went into Time’s Echo.
One of the haunting ironies Eichler underscores is that even though these four composers and their four compositions were accepted by many as part of the status quo, they were perhaps more implicitly than explicitly critiques of the status quo.
Eichler suggests possibilities will open: “...when we attempt to hear music as culture’s memory” (p. 15). He also states: “...this book is also implicitly an argument for what I call deep listening—that is, listening with an understanding of music as time’s echo” (p. 15).
The author underscores the irony of the Jewish composer, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy popularizing German music by first conducting J.S. Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion in 1829, and later as the conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig—a post he held for the rest of his life.
Another irony, according to Eichler, was that Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew, was influenced by Richard Wagner, an anti-Semite.
Both Arnold Schoenberg and Arnold Rosé converted to Protestantism in the evangelical church on the Dorotheegasse in Vienna. In the case of Schoenberg, it was one year after a pogrom in Vienna.
During World War I, Schoenberg composed an oratorio Die Jakob sleiter (Jacob’s Ladder), which he didn’t finish. His spiritual distress during World War II led him back to this work.
In 1919, British composer John Foulds composed World Requiem for all who mourned those who died in World War I.
In World War I, German Jews fought along with the Germans, hoping the latter would accept them as equals. Instead, the German Jews were blamed for losing the war—they were scapegoated, claiming that they undermined and sabotaged the German forces.
In 1921, Schoenberg discovered the twelve-tone method of composition. He employed dissonance, contributing to the atonal nature in his works. During the 1920s, he was widely acclaimed and became quite popular as a musician across Europe and internationally.
Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron is described by Eichler and he speculates about why Schoenberg did not finish composing the music for the final act. With the growing anti-Semitism under Hitler and the Nazis in the early 1930s, Schoenberg left Germany never to return.
According to Eichler: “Strauss composed Metamorphosen, regarded today as an iconic masterwork of twentieth-century music, between August 1944 and March 1945 for the conductor Paul Sacher’s Collegium Musicum Zürich” (p. 105). Eichler also describes the work, suggesting there are elements of mourning and: “...a direct quotation from the sublimely tragic funeral march of Beethoven’sEroica Symphony” (p. 105).
Arnold Schoenberg had converted to Lutheranism to be accepted by Germans. However, in 1933, with the growing anti-Semitism of the Nazis, he took refuge in France, and converted to Judaism, and supported Jewish nationalism. Also in 1933, he decided to move to the U.S.A. He had, before many others, prophetically foresaw the mass destruction of the European Jews, urging them to take refuge in safe nations.
Eichler points out that some countries tried to forget the Shoah. “In the United States, Elie Wiesel’s now iconic testimony [Night] was rejected by more than fifteen publishers” (p. 159).
The author describes the world premiere of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw by the amateur Albuquerque Civic Orchestra, conducted by Kurt Frederick as a success, and it was actually performed twice in that concert. Eichler also discusses how Schoenberg’s score was performed, accepted and critiqued in other places.
In Eichler’s discussion of the Holocaust memorialization, he states: “Art remembers what society would like to forget. It does so uniquely in ways that link mind, heart, and spirit” (p. 174).
The author provides some biographical information on Benjamin Britten and analyzes some of his music. Britten’s War Requiem includes World War I poetry by Wilfred Owen, and was influenced by Verdi’s Requiem. It was commissioned for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral. Ironically, Britten was a pacifist, yet in War Requiem, he memorialized the war dead.
When Leningrad was under siege by the Germans on the day that the Germans thought they would end the siege and occupy Leningrad, the city’s musicians played Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, and directed the loudspeakers toward the German troops as an act “...of both cultural pride and sonic-psychological warfare” (p. 248).
Even though Shostakovich was an atheist and not a Jew, he included Jewish musical themes in some of his compositions.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote the poem “Babi Yar,” and Shostakovich placed “Babi Yar” as his first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony. He also included other Yevtushenko poems in the score’s other movements.
Eichler, like other compositions, describes “Babi Yar,” and how it was viewed by pundits and the Soviet government.
Babyn Yar is the place where some 60,000 Jews and around 40,000 others were murdered by the Nazis. It has changed a few times since World War II, depending on the political ideology, as have the monuments at the site.
Shostakovich eventually became a member of the Communist Party, yet, ironically, some viewed him as a secret dissident because of his Thirteenth Symphony.
Both Britten’s War Requiem and Shostakovich’s Babi Yar premiered in 1962, and the composers realized that they were quite similar. Both admired each other’s compositions, visited and corresponded with each other. According to Eichler: “...Britten and Shostakovich also shared a conception of a larger social mission for their art in society” (p. 271).
Perhaps it was providential that as Britten was dying in Aldeburgh, England, Leonard Bernstein was conducting the New York Philharmonic’s performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony,which incorporated death themes.
In this volume, Eichler also discusses the, at times, complex and even controversial connections involving memory and monuments.
Musicians, composers, and historians will most likely benefit the most from this volume.
