Time's Echo

In Time's Echo, the award-winning critic and historian 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. While showing how four towering composers - Shostakovich, Britten, Schoenberg, and Strauss - transformed their experiences of the Second World War and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of music, Eichler proposes new ways of listening to history and coming to hear between its notes the resonances of what earlier eras have written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight, compassion and riveting storytelling, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the promise of art for our lives today.