Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance
£19.30£23.80 (-19%)
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023
‘Profoundly moving.’ EDMUND DE WAAL
‘A work of searching scholarship, acute critical observation, philosophical heft, and deep feeling.’ ALEX ROSS
‘A rare book: extraordinarily powerful – magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human.’ PHILIPPE SANDS
A remarkable and stirring account of how music acts as a witness to history and a medium of cultural memory in the post-Holocaust world.
When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time’s Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.
Eichler shows how four towering composers – Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich – lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music, scores that carry forward the echoes of lost time. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the profound possibilities of art in our lives today.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Faber & Faber, Main edition (7 Sept. 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 400 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0571370535 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0571370535 |
| Dimensions | 15.3 x 2.8 x 23.4 cm |
by Margaret Heffernan
Don’t let the title scare you away. This is outstanding writing about music: accessible, thoughtful and deeply moving. And the history, in its detail, in its connecting of themes, people and places, is superb. It’s very hard to write about music without taking all its beauty away (there’s a reason it IS music, after all) but Eichler does this with such grace and feeling. I can’t think of when I last read a book of history like this that I simply could not put down. The only reason to do so is to listen to the music Eichler writes about. He carries his learning so lightly, writes about composers as human beings with all their genius and flaws and, in an elegant and subtle way, makes an outstanding defense for the arts, for music, for history. Buy two: one for you and one for a friend. Or more.
by DavidT
I highly recommend Time Echoe, it was both enlightening and very moving.