Soldiers and composers: “Time’s Echo,” a review

First the battle, then the music “Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance,” by Jeremy Eichler (Alfred A. Knopf, 386 pp, $30) by Bondo Wyszpolski Let’s start with the premise and purpose of “Time’s Echo,” which is impeccably researched and astonishingly well thought out. Alluding to words written by Theodor Adorno, author Jeremy Eichler writes that “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.” Furthermore, he says, “Time’s Echo” examines the ways that “music bears witness to history and carries forward the memory of the wartime past,” while focusing on four composers and four compositions: Richard Strauss (“Metamorphosen”), Arnold Schoenberg (“A Survivor from Warsaw”), Benjamin Britten (“War Requiem”), and Dmitri Shostakovich (the “Babi Yar” Symphony). “During the war years, [these men] stood at four very different windows looking out at the same catastrophe.” The same catastrophe that they did not see or experience in the same way. Eichler sought to delve into and establish a true connection with the past by way of…

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