Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

Jeremy Eichler

Knopf 400 pp.

By David Schoenbaum

There was reason enough to expect this book to be interesting. But who of us imagined that it would also be timely?

Making art of any historical experience, let alone the great killings of the mid-20th century, is hard enough. In 1911, in a world still at peace, Arnold Schoenberg wrote a Stefan George poem into the last movement of his second string quartet. The conjunction of words and music inspired his friend Wassily Kandinsky, who attended the Munich premiere, to reach for his brushes and paint. The result was"Impression III, (concert), " a semi-abstract modern classic.

Wartime would require a quantum jump further. Picasso's "Guernica,"1937, a political statement if ever there was one, shows what a genius can do with an aerial bombing. But turn it into music?

A quick Google search confirms that it's actually been tried by as many as a dozen composers. But the accompanying audio clips remind the listener of what Dr. Johnson famously said of women preachers. "It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture is proof to a point of what a composer can do with history. Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory," on the other hand, is a reminder that even geniuses need money now and then. His decision to change the dedication, but not the score, of his third symphony should tell us something too.

By any standard, and there are many possibilities, Jeremy Eichler has moved another goal post with his compellngly interesting and original study of "The Second World War, the Holocaust and the Music of Remembrance" in an area where historians most often fear to tread.

For the reader who can't tell a tone row from a hedgerow, it's likely to be a challenging read. But beginning with the subtitle, there's no question what the next 292 pages of text and 59 pages of backnotes will be about.

The challenge begins with the acquisitions librarian who needs to find it a home - or homes - in the vast expanses of the LoC or Dewey-Decimal catalog. But for the professional who knows where to look, there are cues and precedents datng back to literature's most famous search for Lost Time.

Marcel Proust (d. 1922) and Jeremy Eichler (b. 1974) would probably be puzzled to find themselves in the same paragraph, let alone sentence.

But the affinities the iconic meganovelist shares with the Columbia Ph.D. and Boston Globe music critic are as notable in their way as the distances in historical time, physical space and social milieu that separate them.

There are three common denominators. The first is Jews. Central figures in Eichler's book, Jews are no less a regular and familiar presence in Proust's monumental novel. Himself the son of a Jewish mother and an impassioned defender of Capt. Dreyfus, he could hardly help but find Jews as interesting in literature as they were in life.

The second common denominator is music. Eichler, of course, writes about it professionally with the fluency and expertise once associated with the unjustly forgotten Deems Taylor and the equally undeserving German Joachim Kaiser.

But any Proust reader can confirm that music is right up there with the legendary madeleine dipped in tea as a catalyst of reminiscence.

The third common denominator is memory itself. As his title alone makes clear, reminiscence is what Proust's seven volume masterpiece is all about. Eichler does the job in a one-sentence epigraph from Theodor Adorno. "Only history itself, real history with all its suffering and all its contradictions, constitutes the truth of music."

His master narrative begins in 1743 with the arrival in Berlin of the 14-year-old Moses Mendelssohn, born Moshe ben Mendel. What he discovered there was the classical language-fueled self-improvement program known to Central Europeans as Bildung. He then passed it on to Jewish posterity including his grandson, Felix.

Felix, in turn, a prodigy like none since Mozart, left a legacy that that not only included a shelfful of masterpieces that remain standard repertory. He also did his bit to make music, after Greek and Latin, the third classical language of Bildung.

Well before the coming of the 20th century, as Eichler can't remind us too often, German-Jewish culture had ceased to be an oxymoron. Like it or not - and Wagner and the Wagnerians vociferously didn't - it was now an icon of national identity and an export product as familiar as aspirin.

Then came Hitler. Eichler spells out the consequences in the lives and work of two of the century's most notable composers, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. For Strauss, with a Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchilden, the Nazis, like the weather, were something to enjoy where possible and endure when not. For his librettist, the global best-seller Stefan Zweig, they were an existential threat.

His reconstruction and deconstruction of their relationship are among the most fascinating story lines in the book. Strauss proposed, demanded and virtually begged that that continue their affair in secret. But Zweig was having none of it. Not a party member and himself under Gestapo surveillance, Strauss maintained a facsimile of normal life without him.

He even composed a 25-minute monument of sorts called "Metamorphosen” for 23 string players with a quotation from the funeral march slow movement of Beethoven's "Eroica." "In Memoriam" is inscribed beneath it. Metamorphoses of what, in memoriam to whom, remain a matter of scholarly speculation. Meanwhile Zweig emigrated to London, New York and Brazil, where he committed suicide in 1942.

As forthright about his heritage as Strauss was not, Schoenberg proposed an idiosyncratic version of Zionism with himself as Moses. Rather than flash his Protestant baptismal certificate, he stomped out of an Austrian summer resort with family and entourage on being told that they were not welcome. Like countless other German Jews, he took the assassination of Walther Rathenau, postwar Germany's foreign minister, personally. He bought a handgun. Eichler even includes a photo of the license.

In fateful 1933, in a ceremony at a Paris version of a Reform synagogue, Schoenberg declared his intention to return to Judaism. In fateful 1938, a Four-Point Program for Jewry asked presciently "Is there room in the world for almost 7,000,000 people?

Are they condemned to doom?" But an authoritarian ground bass made Thomas Mann uneasy and the article seems never to have been published.

Meanwhile, a three-act opera project, "Moses and Aron offered enough dramatic potential for late Verdi. But it was evidently not enough for the Guggenheim Foundation, which turned him down for the grant that would have allowed hm to write the third act. He died with the opera unfinished.

What did work was a commission from the Koussevitsky Music Foundation in 1947. Composed in 13 days, "A Survivor from Warsaw," is a seven-minute piece for 24 instruments, one or two "speakers" and a men's chorus. It begins, in English, with an unidentified and presumably invented prisoner coming to from the blows of a German sergeant.

All around him fellow prisoners moan while the narrator recalls the sergeant, in Rhenish or Berlin German, counting off candidates for the gas chamber. seemingly out of nowhere, the prisoners then, in Hebrew, burst into "Hear, Oh Israel," the most elemental of Jewish prayers. "...in its deepest essence, a requiem for the dream of a co-created German-Jewish culture in the heart of modern Europe," Eichler calls it.

Commission notwithstanding, Koussevitsky never performed it. He found it too depressing, his wife is supposed to have said. He also disliked the text. Ironically, the premiere could hardly have been less European, modern or otherwise. In March 1948, a diaspora Viennese somehow learned of the piece expressed interest. As conductor of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, Civic Symphony, he also had an orchestra.

Fourteen choristers, cowboys and ranchers included, showed up for rehearsals. The chairman of the University of New Mexico chemistry department signed on as narrator.

It was clearly an occasion. On November 4, an audience of 1600 heard the first performance followed by a repetition. "Applause thundered in the Auditorium," Time reported.

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem too was a thundering success but a very different requiem. No Jews were involved in its gestation But there was a German connection, though not the usual sort. Over 12 hours, beginning around 6.30 p.m. on the night of November 14, 1940, some 509 German bombers unloaded over 500 tons of explosives on the city of Coventry.

Among the collateral damage was the cathedral that had been the city's glory since the 14th century. The devastation would lead to an imaginative reconstruction. And from there to Benjamin Britten, who was meanwhile hanging out in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, and Thomas Mann's son Golo,"with frequent visits," Eichler adds, from Christopher Isherwood and Gypsy Rose Lee.

It was agreed almost immediately that the cathedral should be reconstructed. In 1950 it was agreed to solicit designs. In 1951 the Scotch architect Basil Spence was declared the winner. In 1958, Britten agreed to compose a requiem,though it was 1961 before he began writing in earnest.

If Spence's design was a composite of original and modern, Britten's score was a composite of traditional Latin liturgy interspersed with verses by Wilfred Owen, a singularly gifted war poet, who died in combat, age 25, in 1918. It was first performed, of course in Coventry, May 30, 1962.

The association with World War I, still a giant presence in British historical awareness, is obvious. Eichler is quick to note that the dedication and private correspondence at least acknowledge World War II. What's entirely absent, though Britten had accompanied Yehudi Menhuin almost immediately after the end of the war to play for survivors of Belsen, is any reference to Jews and the shoah.

What was there unexpectedly was a transnational discovery, born of a shared need to commemorate. Haydn-Mozart, Schumann-Mendelssohn, Brahms-Dvorak, composer to composer friendship was not unknown. But it was hard to think of anything quite like this one and the catalyst was war.

On June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Three months later, the Jews of Kyiv were ordered to assemble. Some 30,000 were then marched to a nearby ravine known in Russian as Babi Yar and slaughtered. Over the next two years, a estimated 30,000 more, including Roma, Ukrainian nationalists and Soviet prisoners were slaughtered.

So far as possible, their bodies were destroyed and the ravine itself filled in. Though there was no site to be seen when Eichler came for a visit In 2018, there was no

lack of monuments. But none was Russian, let alone Soviet.

Still, Babi Yar had not disappeared. In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, an unusually interesting young poet, discovered it and, remarkable for place and time, turned it into a published poem. The poem, in turn, was brought to the attention of Dmitri Shostakovich, a figure both both celebrated and systematically humiliated by both Stalin and his successors as one of the era's major composers. Shostakovich immediately wanted to compose it and did as his thirteenth symphony with subtitle

Babi Yar.

While Eichler's account of the work's premiere has the makings of an opera libretto, the audience cheered and cheered. The Usual Suspects were shocked, shocked. The New York Times considered it news fit to print on the front page. In 1970 Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed it. In 1983 the Berlin Philharmonic performed it. As best Eichler can tell, the Vienna Philharmonic has never touched it.

With the help of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a common friend, Britten forwarded a recording of his own requiem to Shostakovich. It was love at first hearing. A cycle of poems on death by an anthology of 20th century poets, Shostakovich's fourteenth symphony was dedicated to Britten. "Whenever I read that dedication, my heart glows," Britten replied. "There can never have been a greater present from one composer to another."

Yo-Yo Ma, a remarkable cellist, is right to call this a remarkable book.

David Schoenbaum is a retired history professor and recidivist freelancer. His books include Hitler's Social Revolution and The Violin, a Social History