Time's Echo

*Winner of Three National Jewish Book Awards: the Everett Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion Book of the Year, the His­to­ry Ger­rard and Ella Berman Memo­r­i­al Award, and the Holo­caust Award in Mem­o­ry of Ernest W. Michel • Listed as one of The New York Times Book Review‘s 100 Notable Books of 2023 and one of NPR’s Books We Love • “History Book of the Year,” Sunday Times of London*

“With exquisite storytelling, “Time’s Echo” explores how music provides a unique lens to understanding one of the darkest times in history . . . [Eichler] pulls back the curtain of these monumental compositions in a richly layered panorama that is part history, part musicology, and part travelogue.” —Penny Schwartz, Jewish Journal

“We were stunned by [Time’s Echo’s] profundity, its masterful structure, its beautiful shimmering sentences. It is evidently a life’s work, a labor of love, and a testimony to the pain of war. It has an utterly unique voice, and it warrants being classed as a masterpiece of nonfiction writing.”—Shortlist citation, Jury of the Baillie Gifford Prize

“A symphonic project, masterfully orchestrated . . . [Eichler’s] antennae for the talismanic property of historic objects (Schiller’s writing desk, Beethoven’s compass), no less than for the choice detail about the people through whose hands they passed, verges on the clairvoyant . . . Against the din of our current war-torn, burn-it-down Iron Age, his voice sounds chords of hopeful enlightenment, even when the witness he bears makes the blood run cold. To paraphrase a verse set by Arnold Schoenberg, a central figure in Eichler’s narrative, his prose feels like air from another planet . . . In sweep and detail, Time’s Echo fuses the talents of a demon researcher, a gifted storyteller, and a world-class connector of dots.” —Matthew Gurewitsch, New Criterion

“A groundbreaking work . . . Eichler’s unique approach to explor­ing his­to­ry will like­ly com­pel read­ers to lis­ten to these com­po­si­tions for the first time or anew, empow­ered by a more nuanced under­stand­ing of their impor­tance.” —Jonathan Fass, Jewish Book Council

“The outstanding music book of this and several years.” —Times Literary Supplement

“On the face of it, this is a book about a handful of composers whose lives were changed beyond measure by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War… But this book is also about landscape, from the mountains of Bavaria to the gates of Buchenwald, as well as music’s extraordinary power to bridge the gap between past and present. It’s written with a rare sensitivity to language and memory, reminiscent of WG Sebald…The result is not just a great book about the legacy of the Second World War, but a work of extraordinary power, beauty and human feeling.” —”History Book of the Year,” The Sunday Times of London

“Time’s Echo is a remarkable book. Jeremy Eichler shows how listening to history through its music can transport us in mind, body, and spirit — resulting in a profound, detailed resurrection of the past into the living present. The composers at the book’s heart come across not as distant historical figures but as fully human characters with whom we can identify. The result is a kind of time travel with music as our mode of transport, a poignant journey back to an era that still affects us, and an inspiringly hopeful meditation on the power of art to remember not just the traumas of the past but also its highest ideals.” —Yo-Yo Ma

“A work of vast historical scholarship and acute musical insights.” —John Adams, The New Yorker

“Like Sebald, Eichler is a gifted storyteller, a poet-in-prose who portrays the lives of composers and their music while braiding strands of both personal and political history. He becomes a modern Virgil: with Eichler as our guide, we travel, like Dante’s pilgrim, through the hell of Europe’s twentieth century . . . [Eichler] succeed[s] in weaving together cultural background and musical description in a way that avoids reduction, honoring the relative autonomy of music while also acknowledging its historical resonance.” —Peter E. Gordon, New York Review of Books

“[A] masterful debut . . . Vivid, luminous prose . . . [Time’s Echo is] a moving declaration of the power of music to transmit human feeling across time.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[Jeremy Eichler] connects the fluidity of musical time to personal and historical memory. Despite detailed endnotes, Time’s Echo is not a reference book. Carefully researched and capacious in scope, it reads as elegy: mournful, elegant and gratifying… Toward the end, Eichler quotes a letter from Shostakovich to Britten… [which] provides a wonderful summary for Time’s Echo: ‘Your music is the most outstanding phenomenon of the twentieth century. And for me it is the source of profound and powerful impressions. Write as much as possible. It is necessary for humanity — and certainly for me.'”—Martha Anne Toll, The Washington Post

“Profoundly moving . . . An absorbing read for serious music lovers that may well become a classic in music criticism.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Eichler, The Boston Globe’s chief classical music critic, suggests that music can help us remember what we’ve lost. Time’s Echo is an engrossing recovery project that reveals the depths of Europe’s ability — and inability — to mourn those losses. On the surface Eichler’s book is a cultural history of four musical works… More deeply, it is a fascinating call to place the stories of musicians into our acts of listening and a compelling testimony to the relationship between music and remembrance…Time’s Echo offers the same kind of immersive experience that [Eichler] encourages us to explore in music. His beautiful meditation on the dark shadows that compelled, propelled and ultimately haunted classical music in Europe during and after World War II inspires our ears.” —Kira Thurman, The New York Times

“Evocative….Mr. Eichler is an eloquent writer with a poetic bent; his text is lyrical and well-researched.” —Stuart Isacoff, Wall Street Journal

“I was deeply moved by this wonderful book. Jeremy Eichler writes profoundly on music, and in Time’s Echo he focuses on music that expresses so much about the truly tragic history of the 20th century. He not only makes us understand, he makes us feel.”—Emanuel Ax

“Authoritative . . . Fascinating and, in its own way, inspiring.”—Kirkus Reviews

“…Erudite, passionately argued, and extraordinarily moving… In a seamless web of historical context, nuanced musical analysis, deft quotation, and his own first-person accounts of travel to relevant sites, Eichler fashions a narrative worthy of one of his principal inspirations, the elegiac novels of W.G. Sebald.” —Christopher Benfey, The Boston Globe

“Part requiem, part poetry, part music, and all heart, this is a book that will contribute to the ages.” —Martha Anne Toll, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Profoundly moving. I am overwhelmed by what Jeremy Eichler has achieved.”—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“Music is an airy, abstract art, yet every note is grounded in history and in the earth. Jeremy Eichler, one of our finest writers on music, captures that duality supremely well in Time’s Echo, his eagerly awaited first book. Delving into twentieth-century musical memorials by Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich, Eichler evokes not only the smoldering power of the music but also the haunted lives and places from which these masterpieces sprang. It is a work of searching scholarship, acute critical observation, philosophical heft, and deep feeling.”—Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise

“This passionate book delves deep into classical music’s responses to World War II, and the tragic intertwining of German and Jewish cultures. Eichler roves through history and language to express how music keeps cultural memory alive. Along the way, he paints an unforgettable portrait of an unspeakable time.”—Jeremy Denk, author of Every Good Boy Does Fine

“At a time when debates rage daily over what histories to memorialize and which to reinterpret, along comes Jeremy Eichler to reveal how music preserves the past in the form of intense emotional experience. With a historian’s deep understanding of how societies respond to the trauma of war, and an intuitive feel for music’s molten heat, he brings us a lucid, moving chronicle of four dramatically different works that were born of the same urge: Zachor—Remember.”—Justin Davidson, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, New York magazine

“How is the past remembered or forgotten? History can often amount to little more than a tired archivist logging away dates and factoids. But as Jeremy Eichler reveals in this splendid and uncompromising book, music is mankind’s imperishable monument to what memory will not and cannot suppress.”—André Aciman, author of Find Me

“In this brilliant, haunting debut, Jeremy Eichler expands our sense of how collective memory works in history. With music, humanity can engage its losses, registering monstrous crimes aurally if invisibly. And while the experience of hearing the notes provides no exact facsimile of what was lost — let alone makes things whole again — it can knit together past and present with remarkable poignancy. Eichler overlays the arresting insight and beautiful prose of the cultural interpreter on the scholarly perspective of a master historian, and the results are a gift for us all.”—Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

“A most rare book: extraordinarily powerful — magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human.”—Philippe Sands, author of The Last Colony

“A literary tour de force . . . Brings the intimate stories of [the Holocaust] to light through the lens of four composers and their ‘music of remembrance’. . . Eichler’s book should be required reading for all.” —Jane Gottlieb, Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association