Time’s Echo

UPDATE: Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford, the UK’s premier nonfiction prize

If you ever doubted that music matters, Eichler has written the book to prove you wrong.”The Sunday Times

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

The most impressive debut of a cultural critic in years.”Samuel Moyn, Yale University

[Jeremy] 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.”The New York Times

From the publisher:

More Praise for Time’s Echo

“…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.The Boston Globe

“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

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, music critic of The New Yorker, author of The Rest is Noise and Wagnerism

A most rare book: extraordinarily powerful—magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human.Philippe Sands, author of East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity’

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, Professor of History and Law, Yale University; author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

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

“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 Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name

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

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 time 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