Time’s Echo

Author:Jeremy Eichler

Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler is a brilliant account of four composers’ musical responses to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust – Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss, A Survivor from Warsaw by Arnold Schoenberg , War Requiem by Benjamin Britten and the 13th ‘Babi Yar’ Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich. He brilliantly tells the story of how the key works came be written and premiered and explores the extent to which music can act as a memorial and testimony to such events, but can also run the risk of aesthetically airbrushing and exploiting such suffering. I found it a compelling read that, like all great writing about music, took me straight back to listen and hear the works with new insights and understanding.

Amongst the recordings he talks about early in the book is a 1929 recording of the Bach double concerto by the Rosé Quartet, led by Arnold Rosé and and also featuring his daughter Alma. Arnold died in London in 1946 a broken man. Alma died in Auschwitz, where she had conducted and led the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. One of the musicians in that orchestra was Anita Lasker, a cellist. She survived Auschwitz and Belsen. Shortly after the liberation of Belsen she was held in a Displaced People’s camp where she saw Britten and Yehudi Menuhin give a performance for the residents there. Eventually she moved to London. There she rebuilt her career as a musician, becoming a co-founder of the English Chamber Orchestra. She married pianist Peter Wallfisch. Her son Raphael is a distinguished cellist, her grandson Benjamin a highly successful composer, particularly of film scores. She has frequently talked about the Holocaust in the UK, Germany Austria and elsewhere and won countless accolades. She is still very much alive and celebrates her 100th birthday next month.

The book is great at making these connections across time and place. The Bach is a joyous piece, still much played today – I have recordings by Hilary Hahn, Andrew Manze and others. It’s incredible enough to hear that 1929 recording, made almost 100 years ago, scratchy and muddy of course, but beautifully played and clearly communicating to people then in the same way it does now. But then you add the context that it is being played by someone who went on to die in Auschwitz. And that in the camp she created an orchestra which included a young musician who, in turn, not only survived but went on to have a successful musical career, and to work with Britten including in the UK premiere of Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony and is still with us today – well, it’s deeply moving. This is Eichler’s proposition – that music makes links across time, connects us with the past, and in so doing takes us into the future with greater understanding and empathy.

Length of Read:Medium

Might appeal to people who enjoyed…

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, or who is interested in 20th century music and in the role of music in history

One thing you’ve learned

I’d never heard Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, and it’s an extraordinary work. The account of how it came to get its world premiere by an amateur orchestra in Alberquerque is one of several great stories in the book

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