In Monday’s (12/4) New Yorker, John Adams writes about music critic Jeremy Eichler’s “ ‘Time’s Echo’ (Knopf), an examination of how music can function as a vehicle for collective memory…. Eichler writes, ‘When music floods a room, there is nowhere to hide.’ Gravely lyrical, the book is a work of vast historical scholarship and acute musical insights, and Eichler, the chief classical-music critic of the Boston Globe, is not shy about his mission, which is to demonstrate that what Thomas Mann called music’s ‘spoken unspokenness’ gives it a unique power to memorialize in a way that engages our emotions. Eichler makes his case by scrutinizing four key mid-century works that attempted to address the catastrophe of the Second World War: Richard Strauss’s ‘Metamorphosen,’ Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw,’ Dmitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, and Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem.’ Each, he claims, functions ‘as a carrier of memory for a post-Holocaust world.’… Eichler details the geneses of these works and their receptions, their composers’ wartime experiences, and the wider history of the war and of the Holocaust.”
