Episode 19: Jeremy Eichler on “Time’s Echo”

“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will be exclusively passed toward dealing with different aspects of the historical record. I wanted to invite readers to join me in thinking about how music as an art form can actually burn through history’s ‘cold storage.’ Unlike another book on the era, music itself can release into the present something of the raw emotion of these earlier lives and earlier eras in order to allow for an expanded contact with the now. When we have an older work of music played again in the room right before us, we’re hearing in a very literal way the past speaking again in the present. In that sense, music is the language of time’s non-linearity and brings these distant moments closer to us.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, historian, former chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and author of Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, which considers the lives and the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Eichler practices what he calls “deep listening.” Traveling to places associated with musical war memorials written by each of his four composers, he returns “these works to history, not for their sake but for ours, so that they may become, among other things, a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost.” Audio excerpts of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten punctuate the conversation.