Deeper listening
The music critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler, aged forty-nine, has been thinking about music and memory for a very long time. Two decades back, during a brief tenure as a stringer for The New York Times, he described an afternoon spent visiting the violin virtuoso and Vienna native Fritz Kreisler in Woodlawn Cemetery, the bucolic four-hundred-acre necropolis in the Bronx. When he told his musician friends about it, he wrote, they looked at him "quizzically." After all, Kreisler had been dead for nearly forty years. Heading home some 1,500 words later, the young time-traveler was contemplating parallels between notes in a musical score and gravestones as twin "portals of memory."
That motif returns, writ large, in Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, Eichler's first book. Even his most generous colleagues must be feeling a twinge of envy at the accolades that instantly began raining down from Publisher's Weekly, Yo-Yo Ma, Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise), Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes), and other panjandrums too numerous to list. Already, translations into German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Korean are in the works.
No, this isn't another of those jargon-choked, radical-chic rants on diversity, equity, and inclusion that delusional music editors at academic presses make bold to launch as trade books. In his introduction, Eichler promises his reader "a book of stories, of sounds, and of places" that is "in some ways very personal." His antennae for the talismanic property of historic objects (Schiller's writing desk, Beethoven's compass), no less than for the choice detail about the people through whose hands they passed, verges on the clairvoyant.
If Henry James advised an aspiring novelist to "try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost," and Robert Browning sang that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp," Eichler has taken up James's challenge in the spirit of Browning. Against the din of our current war-torn, burn-it-down Iron Age, his voice sounds chords of hopeful enlightenment, even when the witness he bears makes the blood run cold. To paraphrase a verse set by Arnold Schoenberg, a central figure in Eichler's narrative, his prose feels like air from another planet.
In three hundred swift pages, Time's Echo delves deep into the genesis, meanings, and reception of four key works sprung from the trauma of war and genocide. We are present at the empty hall in Zurich when Richard Strauss conducts the dress rehearsal of his opaque yet luminous half-hour andante for twenty-three strings, Metamorphosen (1946). We witness the premiere of Schoenberg's harrowing seven-minute cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), led in the composer's absence by Kurt Frederick, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, in Albuquerque of all places, with an amateur chorus of cowboys. Flash forward to 1962 and the consecration of Coventry Cathedral with Britten's monumental War Requiem, as well as the Moscow premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, "Babi Yar," a Molotov cocktail of Russian defiance the Soviet overlords did their futile best to stamp out.
"I am not attempting to deduce or assign new fixed or universal meanings for this music," Eichler writes;
Nor do I offer a comprehensive history of the musical memorialization of the Second World War, or a wide survey of musical responses to the Holocaust.
Instead, this book summons the remarkable lives of four composers central to the mainstream repertoire of Western classical music and follows their paths through the darkness at the heart of the twentieth century. The war-haunted memorials each of them created are extraordinary on their own terms, but also for the considerable light they still cast, one that simultaneously shines backward into the past, forward toward our own era, and sideways to give us flashes of the worlds into which the music was born.
It's a symphonic project, masterfully orchestrated, and, as a glance into the archives shows, entirely of a piece with the work the young Eichler produced for the Times between 1999 and 2005, before signing on with The Boston Globe as chief music critic. (A dedicated music critic—never mind a chief music critic—was a species even then on the brink of extinction in American journalism. In the meantime, the ecology has grown yet more hostile. Happily, Eichler's niche seems to remain secure.)
Consider, in particular, the twentysomething Eichler's paean to Bargemusic: in his eyes, New York's "loveliest and most intimate concert hall"—not to mention the only one in the world "that once transported coffee for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad." Moored at the Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn, Bargemusic thrives today under the direction of the violinist Mark Peskanov. Eichler's account teleports us back to the golden years of its founder, the visionary Olga Bloom, then in her eighties. As Eichler wrote at the time, he loved the cherrywood interior, the majestic view of the Brooklyn Bridge overhead, and above all "the spirit of the music-making, which is almost always visceral and grippingly intense," rendering "historic works from centuries past . . . as vital, white-hot pronouncements for the here and now."
Since then, Eichler's sixth sense for the Proustian power of music to bridge chasms of time, to telescope the past onto the ever-advancing target of the present moment, reviving, if only in flashes, the thoughts, sensations, and experiences of people long gone, has grown ever more refined.
Never forget! Glancing at the German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel's conceit that "the historian is a prophet facing backwards," Eichler proposes the corollary that "the memorialist is a historian, angled towards the future." Prophet, historian, or memorialist—the moral imperative to remember binds all three, facing backward and forward. It points with reverence towards the past, seeking to keep alive and honor the stories of those crushed under the wheels of history. Towards the future, it points with hope—hope that people living today and yet to come can make the world a better place.
In sweep and detail, Time's Echo fuses the talents of a demon researcher, a gifted storyteller, and a world-class connector of dots. The first chapter opens with the hiss and crackle of J. S. Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D minor as captured on vinyl in Vienna on May 29, 1929; late in the final chapter, Eichler cues Shostakovich's death-haunted Symphony No. 14 in Britten's recording of June 14, 1970. Thanks to Eichler's expert marshaling of the evidence, we learn that the two discs are only a single degree of separation apart. Before her death in Auschwitz, Alma Rosé, the second soloist in the Bach, conducted a prisoners' orchestra whose players included Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, one of the cellists in the Shostakovich.
But discovering Dickensian coincidences is hardly the book's be-all and end-all. Now that the last living witnesses of World War II and the Holocaust are leaving the stage, the work of sustaining the memory, whatever the medium, grows ever more Sisyphean. Not that it hasn't been so practically since 1945. On October 19, 1947, a crowd of fifteen thousand gathered in the rain on Riverside Drive in Manhattan to witness the laying of the cornerstone for America's first Holocaust memorial. But like many another promised monument, this one never made it to completion, while others that did get built have a way of vanishing in plain sight.
The written testimony of victims and survivors is subject to similar varieties of oblivion. Shortly after the war, the Soviet writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman assembled the vast Black Book of eyewitness accounts of the atrocities visited on the Jews, but the Soviet censors stopped the presses. Calling out the Nazi invaders was one thing, but officialdom preferred to pass in silence over the thousands of Russians who joined in the persecutions. Decades later, and for different reasons, the Austrian-born death-camp survivor Jean Améry decried the burgeoning literature on the Shoah for relegating the past to "the cold storage of history."
Unlike stone or the written word, musical memorials can shock us into awareness in real time. That's thanks partly, in Eichler's words, to "the visceral immediacy of sound itself," which "penetrates our bodies" and "vibrates within us," clearing what Eichler calls a "space of encounter" between composers, on the one hand, and players, listeners, and spirits of any variety that may attend them on the other.
Eichler calls his antidote to forgetting "deep listening," "listening with an understanding of music as time's echo." Though elusive at first, the metaphor gradually crystallizes. Above all, deep listening is active:
Deep listening is to the memory of music what a performance is to a score: Without a musician to realize a score, it is nothing but a collection of lines and dots lying mute on a page. Similarly, without deep listening there is no memory in music's history. . . . Without deep listening, the voices of the past are whispering into the void.
But when we do listen deeply, "moments drawn from the cultural history and memory of music . . . become part of what we come to hear in the works themselves."
As his reader's sherpa, Eichler leads by telling stories, recalling sounds, visiting places haunted by deeds long steeped in forgetfulness. He whisks us off to Kyiv, where retreating Nazi officials obliterated all physical traces of their pogrom at Babi Yar; the Soviets, in turn, forbade the construction of a memorial for the Jewish victims. We tag along to the Strauss villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the calendar on the composer's desk has lain untouched since September 8, 1949, the day he died. We stroll with Eichler through the village streets, where Jewish townspeople—including Strauss's grandchildren—were spat on, abused, and forced to sign their own expulsion papers.And we read over his shoulder when, months later, his requests for access to unpublished documents in the Richard Strauss Institute are denied. Per the archive's director, the family is "still today . . . strongly reserved with matters regarding these years."
Understandably so: as best he could, Strauss maintained a wary truce with the Third Reich, and he came to understand late in life that his strategy had cost him dearly. His estate's refusal to shed light in dark corners may color what we hear in Metamorphosen, which bears the inscription "in memoriam!" with no hint of what it commemorates. Some regard Metamorphosen, not implausibly, as a lament for shattered ideals going back to the Enlightenment, ideals Eichler carefully lays out early in the book. Think Moses Mendelssohn, "the German Socrates." Think Schiller, Beethoven, the Ode to Joy. All pulverized.
Whatever the case, a composer's intended "message" is merely the first draft for meanings that will accrete over time—or fail to. To illustrate one such failure, Eichler stirs the ashes of the World Requiem, advertised as a "cenotaph in sound." Composed by the largely self-taught Englishman John Foulds in remembrance of the devastation of World War I, this symphony of 1,200 was meant to out-Mahler Mahler's Symphony No. 8, the "Symphony of a Thousand." Although some critics demurred, the premiere in the cavernous rotunda of London's Royal Albert Hall caused a sensation. Within four years, however, "annual" performances petered out without a whimper.