‘Profoundly moving.’ Edmund de Waal

‘A most rare book: extraordinarily powerful – magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human.’ Philippe Sands

In Time’s Echo, the award-winning critic and historian Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. While showing how four towering composers – Shostakovich, Britten, Schoenberg, and Strauss – transformed their experiences of the Second World War and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of music, Eichler proposes new ways of listening to history and coming to hear between its notes the resonances of what earlier eras have written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight, compassion and riveting storytelling, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the promise of art for our lives today.

‘The outstanding music book of this and several years.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘A masterpiece . . . We were stunned by its profundity, its masterful structure, its beautiful shimmering sentences.’ Jury of the Baillie Gifford Prize

‘Eloquent and thought-provoking . . . an insightful reflection on how we remember and who we forget.’ Leah Broad, Financial Times

‘A work of vast historical scholarship and acute musical insights.’ John Adams, The New Yorker

‘If you ever doubted that music matters, Eichler has written the book to prove you wrong.’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time’s Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.

Eichler shows how four towering composers – Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich – lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music, scores that carry forward the echoes of lost time. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the profound possibilities of art in our lives today.