Books

Time’s Echo is a book with enormous ambitions. That it achieves them, in fact over-leaps them, is astonishing. In this profound and scholarly study, Jeremy Eichler attempts to show how music retains the memory not only of its creative context, but also the intent of its composer. And when that context and emotional trigger is traumatic – in the examples in this book, the trauma is related to the Holocaust, perhaps the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century – the music has an impact almost beyond human ken.

Eichler focuses on Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten and Shostakovich. As anyone who has heard the works of these composers played by a live orchestra will attest, they have created bodies of work so powerful as to be visceral; if art can be an assault on the senses, these composers have come as close to attacking listeners’ nervous systems as