In 1958 the Ukrainian-born Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote a poem with the simple title “Music.” It bears the dedication “To Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I live on earth.” The poem begins: “Something miraculous burns in music;/as you watch, its edges crystallize./Only music speaks to me/when others turn away their eyes.” Music, we are told, remains faithful even though all others have gone: “When fearful friends abandoned me/music stayed, even at my grave,/and sang like earth’s first shower of rain/or flowers suddenly everywhere alive.” That such an exquisite artist in words could write a hymn of praise to the power of a sister muse raises a host of questions. How does music transcribe suffering, and how can it console? Why does it arouse feelings in us, and can those feelings be put into words? Is music even a language? If so, how does it convey its meaning?
For those who write about music these are not idle questions. Not only critics but composers, too, have often said that music is a self-referential art with its own syntax and meanings that resist translation, since music, they claim, is “absolute” and utterly beyond representation. As the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus once explained, the idea of absolute music has a long and vexed history that spanned the nineteenth century and reached its apogee in the great works of symphonic and chamber music by the likes of Beethoven and Brahms, composers whom Europe’s haute bourgeoisie venerated as saints of a secular religion. In the twentieth century, however, this once-noble idea began to curdle: the horrors of modern war and genocide seemed to condemn the notion of world-transcendent art. As a matter of moral necessity, music, Akhmatova’s “faithful friend,” might have to remain at the graveside while humanity mourned.
These questions haunt Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler, a cultural historian who was the chief classical music critic for The Boston Globe from 2006 to 2024 and is now a professor at Tufts. In prose that is graceful and often as melancholy as its theme, Eichler explores music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma and to translate collective suffering into sound without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty. His book follows in the footsteps of other historians and critics, most notably The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, who have succeeded in weaving together cultural background and musical description in a way that avoids reduction, honoring the relative autonomy of music while also acknowledging its historical resonance. As his title suggests, Eichler wishes us to hear the “echoes” of history in music and to appreciate how music is both a vehicle for memory and a medium in which the past comes alive for the present.
Time’s Echo explores this question with reference to a handful of musical works: A Survivor from Warsaw by Arnold Schoenberg, Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten, and the Thirteenth Symphony by Shostakovich, the first movement of which is set to a Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem about the massacre of Jews by German forces at Babi Yar in September 1941. All four were composed in the aftermath of World War II, and all of them somehow address, directly or obliquely, the tragedy of mass death. To sift the sediments of history and memory that these works contain, Eichler uses a technique that (following the late composer Pauline Oliveros) he calls “deep listening,” a practice that remains alert to the multiple aspects of a given work—its surrounding culture, origin, and reception—all of which he approaches in an ecumenical manner, “with the ears of a critic and the tools of a historian.”
More than a study of music, Time’s Echo is a study of the “social memory of art,” a once-fashionable genre of cultural history whose greatest exemplar was perhaps Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979), a kaleidoscopic study that sought to show how music, alongside painting, architecture, and psychoanalysis, could be a valid topic of historical inquiry. Like Schorske, Eichler is catholic in his methods, and he has little patience for the conventional idea that history must emphasize the primacy of politics. Scattered throughout his book are many black-and-white photographs, untitled but charged with pathos, that lend a visual dimension to his words. It’s a strategy he has borrowed from W.G. Sebald, the German novelist whose works were also consumed with questions of European memory. Like Sebald, Eichler is a gifted storyteller, a poet-in-prose who portrays the lives of composers and their music while braiding strands of both personal and political history. He becomes a modern Virgil: with Eichler as our guide, we travel, like Dante’s pilgrim, through the hell of Europe’s twentieth century.
The book begins on familiar terrain in Vienna, the birthplace of musical modernism, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Immediately, however, we are caught off guard as Eichler begins to shuttle backward and forward through time. He invites us to listen with him to a digitized recording of a 1929 performance of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, the hisses and pops still audible, played by the violinists Alma Rosé and her father, Arnold. The Rosé family, born Rosenblum in Romania, eventually moved to the imperial capital and ascended to the heights of the Viennese musical establishment. The young Arnold married Gustav Mahler’s sister Justine. In addition to serving as the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, he also founded the Rosé String Quartet, which premiered works by Brahms and later gave celebrated performances of works by Schoenberg, the pioneer of the musical avant-garde.
Although these “two Arnolds” exemplified the German-Jewish cultural symbiosis, they did not share a common fate. Schoenberg, who resigned in protest in 1933 from his teaching post at Berlin’s Prussian Academy of Arts, immigrated to the United States and eventually assumed a position at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he lived until his death in 1951. Rosé escaped to London with Alma’s help but died, heartbroken, shortly after the war. Alma was arrested by the Gestapo and transferred to Auschwitz, where she conducted an orchestra of female prisoners that played for the SS. On the rare occasions when she felt the performances met her standards, she would say, “This would have been good enough to be heard by my father.” She died in Auschwitz in April 1944.
Time’s Echo is thick with such tangled tales, but they do not distract us from Eichler’s inquiry into what he calls “music of memory.” The first composition that he discusses, A Survivor from Warsaw, is hardly an easy subject for interpretation. Written in August 1947, it was among the first pieces of music to confront the traumatic memory of the Holocaust. Dissonant, even violent in its sounds, it is expressionist in style and unabashedly a twelve-tone work, written according to the revolutionary compositional technique that Schoenberg had developed in his attempt to break free of conventional musical grammar.
Scored for a narrator, chorus, and orchestra, Survivor is a cantata that relates the story of one man’s harrowing experiences in a concentration camp. “I cannot remember ev’rything,” the narrator begins. But memory returns in pieces, and he does not shirk from recalling the worst details. A camp guard shouts (in German) that the prisoners standing before him must count off: “I want to know how many I’m going to deliver to the gas chamber!” They begin to count, at first slowly, then faster, until “it finally sounded like a stampede of wild horses.” Then comes a startling shift: the chorus sings the Shema, the traditional Hebrew prayer that extolls God’s unity and has also been a cry of martyrdom.
From the beginning A Survivor from Warsaw was a controversial work, and some critics found that it descended into kitsch. Schoenberg hoped that the piece would have its premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge Koussevitzky. But the Russian-born conductor (himself of Jewish descent) demurred, perhaps because he felt unnerved by the violence of its themes or embarrassed by the melodrama and explicit religiosity of its conclusion. Instead, the work had its premiere in the most unlikely of settings: a gymnasium in Albuquerque where it was performed by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra, along with a chorus that included ranchers and cowboys. The performance of this late masterpiece of Viennese modernism before an audience in New Mexico was, Eichler writes, “as incongruous as a Sacher torte at a rodeo.” The elderly Schoenberg, though too ill to attend, was gratified to read a telegram from the conductor informing him that his work had been received with enthusiasm by an estimated 1,600 people who filled the gym.
Not all listeners have been so kind. The philosopher Theodor Adorno, usually a proponent of the Schoenberg school, wrote that there was “something awkward” about the composition and that it risked turning the victims into works of art. The charge—we might call it aestheticism—is not without warrant, and as Eichler acknowledges, this is a risk that inheres in all Holocaust memorials. Art after Auschwitz must try to evoke the violence that was done to human beings without wrapping it in a beautiful aura and diminishing the memory of their pain.
The problem of aestheticization is not unique to Holocaust memorials. It is common to all artworks that seek to commemorate events of great suffering. But the challenge of artistic commemoration may prove especially complex when the aesthetic medium consists of music without a text. Most of the works that Eichler has selected fuse two media—music and words—that have enjoyed a relatively harmonious marriage across the centuries, from the singing of Homeric epic to Church liturgy and Lutheran chorale to modern opera. Today this kind of multimedia fusion may strike most audiences as so natural that they seldom pause to ask whether the words and the music are actually conveying the same thing, or whether there may be meanings in the music that do not simply correspond to what is happening in the text. The Songs Without Words, miniatures for piano by Felix Mendelssohn, are not altogether wordless: a handful carry descriptive titles (though some were not given by the composer). These titles can assist us, if we want assistance, in determining what the individual pieces are about.
Program music, in the broadest sense, uses tones to paint a picture, to plot a story, or to transcribe nature’s sounds. (Think of the birdsong in pieces by Olivier Messiaen or in the “Scene by the Brook” in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.) With these simple techniques music points beyond itself to the nonmusical world, and the listener may feel assured that musical meanings are fixed or, at the very least, not open to endless interpretation. And when music is accompanied by an actual text (as in a cantata or a mass) the words can serve as signposts as we make our way across landscapes of sound.
This presents a puzzle: What meanings can an audience grasp when music has no text at all? The enigma of absolute music becomes especially challenging when we are told that a musical composition, though wordless, nonetheless refers to historical events of enormous gravity. Music is supposed to serve as a repository of memory, but can we ever feel entirely sure of what is being remembered or how?
Strauss’s Metamorphosen is a case in point. Composed between August 1944 and March 1945, it is a work in the late Romantic style that is scored for twenty-three string instruments, each of which pursues its own melodic line. To hear it is to feel oneself afloat on beautiful waves of chromatic sound that surge and shift, but without any clear directive from the composer as to what we are supposed to make of it. The title could refer to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Goethe’s treatise The Metamorphosis of Plants. But such allusions hardly unlock a definitive meaning; they only deepen the mystery of endless and organic transformation. Audiences who were familiar with Strauss’s earlier tone poems would have expected programmatic titles such as Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”), Eine Alpensinfonie (“An Alpine Symphony”), or Also sprach Zarathustra (named after Nietzsche’s book). But Metamorphosen lacks any obvious program; it suggests only indefinite change. A musical quotation from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony implies that we are in a mournful mood, and in his score, below the quotation, Strauss even wrote the words “In Memoriam!”
The lack of a self-evident program leaves Eichler in something of a quandary, since he knows he cannot simply impose his own interpretations. “To some extent,” he grants, “the work’s abstract nature allows us to hear in it what we wish.” But this does not deter him from reading Metamorphosen as a musical memorial for World War II. This reading is no doubt plausible, though it leads into a thicket of interpretational problems that no one could be expected to resolve. Historical clues from the composer’s life only take us so far. Although Strauss was never a member of the Nazi Party, beginning in 1933 he served as president of the Reich Music Chamber, the state-run body under the control of Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda that had the task of promoting a musical canon cleansed of any “degenerate” influences. Strauss also conducted at the Bayreuth Festival, where Richard Wagner’s “music of the future” was performed before swooning audiences and Nazi leaders.
These facts are no doubt unsettling, but what they tell us about Metamorphosen as a work of music remains unclear. Strauss seldom burdened his compositions with overtly political themes, with the major exception of Friedenstag (an antiwar opera that premiered in 1938). When judging his compromises with the Third Reich we should also note that his own family was in jeopardy. Long before the Nazi seizure of power his son, Franz, had married Alice von Grab, the daughter of Czech Jews. The couple had two sons who, according to the race laws, were not of “pure” blood but Mischlinge (of mixed blood). It is not implausible to think that Strauss made his Faustian bargain with the regime in part because he wished to protect his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren. Unfortunately Strauss could not save other members of Alice’s family. Paula Neumann, Alice’s grandmother, was deported to Terezín, and in the spring of 1944 the composer, believing he could intercede, apparently ordered a chauffeur to take him to the gates of the camp, where he announced, “I am Richard Strauss, and I have come to take Frau Neumann away.” But the great composer was rebuffed, and Neumann died in Terezín later that year.
Such facts are well known but still hotly debated. If we wish to evaluate the composer’s degree of complicity with the Third Reich, evidence of this kind could be added to either side of the moral ledger. What, for instance, are we to make of the fact that Strauss worked closely with the novelist Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who wrote the libretto for Die schweigsame Frau, a work that the Nazis banned after only a few performances in 1935? Or the fact that Strauss refused to accede to the party’s demand that Zweig’s name be struck from the libretto? The struggle ended only when Strauss was forced to step down as president of the Reich Music Chamber.
Whatever we make of these facts, we might still ask: What does all this have to do with Metamorphosen? What meanings can we find in a musical work when it lacks all directives for its interpretation? To this question Eichler offers a provocative response:
What this music knows should no longer be bounded by Strauss’s own intentions in creating this score, or by the details of a life it both illuminates and leaves in darkness. A composer’s own aims can help launch a work into the world, they can establish an interpretive frame, but they cannot fix the music’s meaning over time.
This strikes me as the only suitable answer. But is it actually an answer? Rather than telling us what the music means (if meaning is even the right word), it simply states a methodological principle that any and all interpretations will be ones that we have made, not ones we have found. Instead of imposing its meanings on us, the music, writes Eichler, “invites future listeners to participate at every performance in shaping its contours anew.” Because Strauss himself never specified what exactly Metamorphosen was commemorating, he created what Eichler calls an “open-ended memorial.” We may suspect that it’s a tombstone, but it’s a tombstone that lacks a name. Eichler recognizes, of course, that this problem is not unique to Metamorphosen. What’s exhilarating about music is that it is always open-ended. No historical interpretation, no matter how elaborate, will succeed in nailing down its meaning once and for all.
With Britten’s War Requiem Eichler finds himself on steadier ground. Incorporating words from the Missa pro defunctis—the Latin Mass for the dead—along with poetry by the celebrated antiwar poet Wilfred Owen, who died in the Great War, the War Requiem is unmistakably a work of commemoration. It had its world premiere in May 1962 at Coventry Cathedral, the eviscerated ruin that is itself a memorial to those who were terrorized or killed during the Nazi bombing campaign in the fall of 1940. At the time Britten was commissioned to write the work, he was best known for his opera Peter Grimes and was already esteemed as the greatest composer on the British scene. His works exemplify what Eichler calls “public-facing modernism,” with long stretches of tonality that do not tax the untutored ear, though they are nonetheless comparable in style to other works of high modernism in their spare harmonies and broken phrasing, “as if,” writes Eichler, “only a cracked mirror could accurately reflect a broken world.”
The choice of Owen’s poetry was well suited to Britten’s musical memorial. A convinced pacifist and a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, the composer found in Owen’s writing a perfect voice to express his own outrage at the senselessness of warfare while also displacing his anger onto World War I to lend the work a more expansive meaning. As Eichler notes, however, the quasi-universalist message of the War Requiem also allowed Britten to avoid any reference to particular victims. Jews are not mentioned, a convenient omission for a work that collapses the moral distinction between the two wars. Addressing this problem takes courage, and Eichler poses a series of challenging questions: “Does it matter if one side is fighting on behalf of fascism? And in a more basic sense, how should a pacifist philosophy approach the phenomenon of state-sponsored genocide?” Although he does not offer a definitive answer to such questions (how could he?), Eichler notes that the War Requiem is a work of its time that reflects “the broader history of the delayed recognition of the Holocaust in British society.”
No such problems of facile universalism arise when we consider Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, which was completed at nearly the same time as the War Requiem; both had their premieres in 1962. Shostakovich professed the deepest admiration for his British contemporary, writing that “your music is the most outstanding phenomenon of the twentieth century.” But the two works could hardly be more dissimilar. Shostakovich often wrote in a musical idiom that fell into official disrepute in the Soviet Union for its alleged formalism, a blunt charge that was used liberally against any artist who strayed from the narrow path of socialist realism and adopted methods associated with modernist trends in the West.
With works such as the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich found favor with the authorities, but even pieces such as the Eleventh and Twelfth Symphonies, ostensibly written to celebrate the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, respectively, did not express the triumphalist mood that the state required. In 1960, however, under Khrushchev’s rule, Shostakovich was promoted to full membership in the Communist Party and took up the prestigious post of general secretary of the Composers’ Union. He used this newfound safety to write what was perhaps his most controversial work, a commemoration of Jews murdered by the Nazis and a condemnation of Soviet forgetting.
It is the first movement of the Thirteenth Symphony, with its text by Yevtushenko, that ignited the controversy. Entitled “Babi Yar,” Yevtushenko’s poem commemorates the more than 33,000 Jews who were murdered by machine-gun fire over two bloody days in a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv. During the German invasion an estimated 2.5 million Soviet Jews were killed, but as Eichler reminds us, the two-day operation at Babi Yar was the single most lethal massacre within the USSR. For the Soviet authorities, however (and especially for Stalin, whose antisemitism became especially pronounced in his last years), the Jewish identity of the victims was an ideological inconvenience to be airbrushed from the official history of a war against fascism.
Yevtushenko’s poem speaks out against this double crime—the crime of the murder and the crime of repressing its memory. “Over Babi Yar, there is no monument,” the poem begins. The same line is sung in unison by a chorus in the Thirteenth Symphony. The Soviet government responded with what was effectively a ban on any future performances and then—as if to prove the truth of its opening line—ordered that the ravine be filled in. The adjoining Jewish cemetery was destroyed and replaced by a TV tower and apartment blocks. It was not enough to declare war on art; this was also a war on memory.
Eichler handles this story with grace and moral sensitivity, but he also acknowledges the risks that come into play when art seeks to address historical atrocity. “Subtlety,” he admits, “is not a quality closely associated with what we may call first-generation memory art.” Not unlike A Survivor from Warsaw, the “Babi Yar” chorus in the Thirteenth Symphony uses explicit description to make the violence of the past fully and painfully present. But we must ask: Are there any limits to what art can tell? Are some events simply too gruesome for aesthetic transfiguration? Is writing music after Auschwitz “barbaric,” as Adorno famously said about poetry?
When one ponders the possibilities of art after Auschwitz, such questions are seldom out of mind. But these are questions that hardly apply to the Holocaust alone. It would have been intriguing, for example, to learn what Eichler would say about Hiroshima Symphony No. 1, by the Japanese composer Takashi Niigaki. It turns out that the list of such mournful musical compositions is dreadfully long. It surely includes works such as Blood on the Fields (1997), an oratorio by Wynton Marsalis that narrates the harrowing northward journey of Jesse and Leona as they escape from slavery to freedom; it might also include the multimedia performance More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) by the South African artist William Kentridge, a kind of danse macabre that seems to commemorate all human suffering.
Eichler’s book is written in a personal and thoughtful voice that occasionally feels as though it’s about to lapse into sentimentalism, but when writing about such horrors he can hardly be blamed. How, after all, could it be otherwise? His book explores what may be one of the greatest paradoxes of humanity. We are strange creatures gifted with two kinds of inventiveness: for killing and for creating. Our capacity for violence seems boundless, but so too our capacity for art.