Time’s Echo and the Burden of Musical Memory
Jeremy Eichler explores how 20th-century music preserves memories of war and what it means when remembrance comes with ambiguity.
Music is more than entertainment. It can evoke powerful memories and even memorialize important events. But music does so in an intangible way that’s difficult to describe.
Jeremy Eichler’s book, Time’s Echo, confronts that challenge and builds a compelling picture of how powerful music can be while acknowledging the limitations of both the music and its composers. He begins by describing the role music plays in memory itself:
“An event seared in memory from decades ago may haunt the mind with a power far greater than events that took place only yesterday. Indeed, while Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, was said to be mother of all the Muses, this book contends that one daughter was the first among equals. Memory resonates with the cadences, the revelations, the opacities, and the poignancies of music. Those very resonances, sensed over time, also have a way of exposing a certain void in the present.”
Eichler focuses on how four composers wrote pieces memorializing World War II and the Holocaust. Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten each wrote monumental pieces that captured the tragedy and devastation of the era.
They enthralled audiences, but the effect they had on their memories varied wildly. Some chose to memorialize the Holocaust while others avoided confronting it. As Eichler observed early on:
“What we choose to remember is also what we preserve, and what we preserve can be built upon.”
Not everyone who came into contact with great music—or composed it—chose to build.
Strauss and His Metamorphosen
Of the four composers Eichler studies in Time’s Echo, Richard Strauss has the most complicated relationship with his music and the Nazi regime. He collaborated with the Nazis to become the Reich Music Chamber President, participating in the denunciation of Thomas Mann to curry favor with the regime. Strauss eventually fell out of favor with top Nazi officials, but not before establishing his reputation as an early cultural collaborator.
After the war, Strauss composed Metamorphosen, a searing, mournful piece for strings. He quoted Beethoven’s funeral march from his Eroica symphony and inscribed “In Memorium” below the march’s quotation.
Strauss never specified what he was memorializing. While audiences who heard the pain they survived in Strauss’s music, Strauss was never able to fully distance himself from his early collaboration with the Nazis, even as he attempted to protect his own Jewish family members. Eichler reflected on the composer’s role in attaching meaning to a piece of music.
“A composer’s own aims can help launch a work into the world, they can establish an interpretive frame, but they cannot fix the music’s meaning over time. In fact, by never specifying what exactly Metamorphosen was commemorating, Strauss created a uniquely open-ended memorial, one that almost explicitly invites future listeners to participate at every performance in shaping its contours anew.”
However, that ambiguity isolates the victims of the war and the Holocaust who most needed recognition. Strauss can’t come back from the dead to clarify the meaning of his musical memorial, but Eichler has hope for future listeners:
“The hope would be to lash new remembrances to its rafts of sound, to enlarge the music’s field of reference, to broaden its circle of moral concern, and to angle its sorrow toward nearby suffering of the sort to which Strauss in his own lifetime seemed all too impervious.”
Memory has Different Paces in Different Places
Holocaust remembrance may seem ubiquitous in Germany, and in most places, it is. However, Strauss’s original village remained an anomaly for a long time. A memorial to the Holocaust’s victims didn’t go up in Strauss’s hometown until 2010. Eichler notes that:
Memory, as one scholar has observed, ‘is not like a light switch: on or off.’ The innkeeper who had directed me to the soldiers’ memorial did not seem to know of the newer monument’s existence. And rather more tellingly, for decades after the war and until quite recently, the town allowed the Nazi-vandalized grave of its other musical son—the eminent German-Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, who, as mentioned, led the world premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal—to languish in a state of civic neglect.”
Music may evoke powerful memories, but its effects won’t be felt equally across a culture. Pieces like the Metamorphosen can urge us to remember horrors survived. Which horrors end up being remembered depends a frightening amount on the audiences.