“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 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.

---

WORKS CITED

(In order of mention.)

 

Dmitri Shostakovich. Symphony No. 14. Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, 1973.

 

Jonathan Biss. “Jonathan Biss Says the Unsayable: The transfiguring language of music,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Fall 2017: Music.

 

Jeremy Eichler. “Language Where Languages End.” The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, 17th annual fall conference, October 17, 2025.

 

Jeremy Eichler. Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War. New York: Vintage, 2024. 

 

Stefan Zweig. The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Pushkin Press Classics, 2024.

 

Svetlana Boym. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

 

W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 2016.

 

Johann Sebastian Bach. Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1043 (audio recording). Rosé String Quartet, 2019.

 

Osip Mandelstam. The Noise of Time: Selected Prose. Translated by Clarence Brown. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

 

Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E. Woods and introduced by A.S. Byatt. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2005.

 

Pierre Nora. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, Spring 1989. JSTOR.

 

Walter Benjamin. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Verso Books, 2025.

 

Jean Améry. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.

 

Richard Wagner. Judaism in Music and Other Essays. Translated by William Ashton Ellis. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

 

Arnold Schoenberg. “Opinion or Insight? (1926).” In Style and Idea: Selected Writings. Edited by Leonard Stein and translated by Leo Black. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2010.

 

Arnold Schoenberg. “Composition with Twelve Tones (1) (1941).” In Style and Idea: Selected Writings. Edited by Leonard Stein and translated by Leo Black. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2010.

 

Arnold Schoenberg. Moses und Aron: Opera in Three Acts (audio recording). New York: Columbia Masterworks, 1957.

 

Arnold Schoenberg. A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (audio recording). Performed by the Boston Symphony, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, 1999.

 

Elie Wiesel. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

 

Primo Levi. Survival In Auschwitz. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

 

Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. Edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner. New York: Routledge, 1989.

 

Richard Strauss. Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings (audio recording). Wiener Philharmoniker, conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi, 1992.

 

Book of Deuteronomy. In The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. Translated by Robert Alter. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

 

Olivier Messiaen. Quartet for the End of Time (audio recording). Tashi Quartet, 1976.

 

Benjamin Britten. War Requiem, Op. 66 (audio recording). London Symphony Chorus, Choir of Eltham College, and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, 2012.  

 

Wilfred Owen. Collected Poems. Edited by C. Day Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1965.

 

Dmitri Shostakovich. Symphony No. 13 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 113 (audio recording). Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin, 2006.

 

Yevgeny Yevtushenko. “Babii Yar.” In The Collected Poems, 1952-1990. Edited by Albert C. Todd. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke. New Poems. Translated by John Greening. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2025.

 

Guillaume Apollinaire. Alcools. Translated by Donald Revell. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995.

 

Federico García Lorca. Poem of the Deep Song: Poema Del Cante Jondo. Translated by Carlos Bauer. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.