Living memorial
The haunting legacies of World War II and the Holocaust, enshrined in sound rather than stone
We seem to be living in an age of memorials. Traumatic events like the Oklahoma City bombing or the Sept. 11 attacks are commemorated with monuments sufficiently durable to preserve the illusion that this time, at least, we will never forget. But memorials too can be mortal. In 1892, the city of Leipzig erected a huge bronze statue to honor Felix Mendelssohn, the leading German musician of his time, who had helped to restore Bach’s legacy, founded Germany’s first conservatory, and produced masterly works of his own, including his incomparable Octet, composed when he was 16. On Nov. 9, 1936, the statue was demolished in the dead of night. Although Mendelssohn had been baptized as a child, and seemed a beacon of Enlightenment hopes for universal tolerance, he was, in the eyes of the Nazi regime, just another Jew.
In his erudite, passionately argued, and extraordinarily moving book “Time’s Echo,” Jeremy Eichler, the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, reminds us that some of the greatest 20th-century memorials were erected in the seemingly ephemeral but emotionally enveloping medium of sound. “While stone monuments would like our full attention, too, our commitment to witness,” he writes, “they often cannot summon it as music can.” 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.
“Time’s Echo” is structured around four towering examples of “musical memorials,” as Eichler calls them, constituting a haunting legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem,” set to texts by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen, commemorated the hideous carpet bombing of Coventry on Nov. 14, 1940. British code-breakers had intercepted the message “Moonlight Sonata,” not, it turned out, a reference to Beethoven’s piano piece, but to the full moon that terrible night. While Eichler is perhaps more critical of Britten’s fiercely held pacifism than he needs to be, he powerfully invokes the “lean harmonies and jagged edges” of Britten’s music, “as if only a cracked mirror could accurately reflect a broken world.”
Britten’s friend Dimitri Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, known as “Babi Yar,” is likewise set to poetry, by the Russian (and non-Jewish) poet Yevtushenko remembering the murder of more than 30,000 Ukrainian Jews across two days in September 1941, who were hastily buried in a steep ravine outside of Kyiv. The ravine itself was leveled during the Soviet period, “driving a permanent wedge,” Eichler notes, “between the landscape and its memory.” It is the music that remains. After “dissonant figures played by muted brass curdle the harmony” of the opening bars of the symphony, a chorus of basses intones the first words of Yevtushenko’s poem, “Over Babi Yar, there is no monument.”
Some of Eichler’s most fascinating pages are devoted to Arnold Schoenberg’s searing “A Survivor from Warsaw,” a seven-minute composition for singers and small orchestra that recounts the final moments of a group of Jews in a concentration camp, with Schoenberg’s jagged 12-tone musical language providing an uncanny vehicle for the horror. Baptized like Mendelssohn, Schoenberg embraced his Jewish identity in the work, composed in 13 days during his exile in Los Angeles. “A man who witnessed the modern era dawn in musical Berlin” now lived across the street from Shirley Temple, Eichler notes, and “stayed at home to watch ‘Hopalong Cassidy,’ ‘The Lone Ranger,’ and UCLA football games.” In a bizarre turn of events, “Survivor” — ignored by Serge Koussevitsky, who had commissioned it — received its premiere in a university gymnasium in Albuquerque with amateur musicians and a “chorus of cowboys.”
The odd man out in Eichler’s quartet is Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” “a death mask in sound” with no explicit claim to memorial status beyond the enigmatic words
“In Memoriam!” at the end of the score. Strauss had found inspiration for the work, composed for two dozen string soloists during the final months of the war, in a Goethe poem about the impossibility of self-knowledge. For Eichler, Strauss’s music circles around his own “morally problematic career” as a cultural collaborator with the Nazi regime. Strauss used his considerable prestige to protect his own family, including his Jewish daughterin-law, but, as Eichler notes, his war years were an unsettling profile in accommodation rather than courage.
A new Mendelssohn statue was unveiled in Leipzig in 2008, “a monument to a monument,” Eichler notes in his powerful closing pages, as he listens to the “miraculous” Octet on his headphones. In “Time’s Echo,” Eichler poses an eloquent challenge to readers. To experience musical memorials “in the fullness of what they have to offer,” he writes, “requires a different modality of listening. We are there not to be entertained but to bear witness to the music’s own testimony.”