Echoes of Time: World War II, the Holocaust and the Music of Memory
19.99 €
15.99 €
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Echoes of Time: World War II, the Holocaust and the Music of Memory
19.99 €
15.99 €
In 1785, the great German poet Friedrich Schiller wrote “Ode to Joy” and embodied in it the innermost dreams of the European Enlightenment. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony gave Schiller's words wings, but a century later the same Ode to Joy was adopted by Nazi propagandists and twisted to the point of impossibility. When it comes to how society remembers these increasingly distant catastrophes, history books, archives, documentaries, stone-carved memorials come to mind. Jeremy Eichler offers to listen to the musical compositions-memorials of the Second World War. The author passionately and frankly proves the power of music as a cultural memory, an art form capable of carrying the meaning of the past.
The author shows how four outstanding composers – Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten – survived the era of World War II and the Holocaust, and then embodied their experiences in deeply moving, transcendental pieces of music that are echoes of lost time. Eichler is tireless and inventive: he attracts the testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians and ordinary people. It shows how an entire era was encoded in these sounds and the destinies of composers. Eichler visited key places associated with the creation of music, from the ruins of the cathedral in Coventry to the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev. As the living memory of World War II fades, Echo of Time offers new ways to listen and hear history. To learn in this music echoes of what I heard, what I wrote and dreamed about, what I hoped for and what another era mourned. This book, full of lyricism and compassion for its heroes, makes us think about the legacy of war, the presence of the past in our lives today.
The author shows how four outstanding composers – Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitry Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten – survived the era of World War II and the Holocaust, and then embodied their experiences in deeply moving, transcendental pieces of music that are echoes of lost time. Eichler is tireless and inventive: he attracts the testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians and ordinary people. It shows how an entire era was encoded in these sounds and the destinies of composers. Eichler visited key places associated with the creation of music, from the ruins of the cathedral in Coventry to the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev. As the living memory of World War II fades, Echo of Time offers new ways to listen and hear history. To learn in this music echoes of what I heard, what I wrote and dreamed about, what I hoped for and what another era mourned. This book, full of lyricism and compassion for its heroes, makes us think about the legacy of war, the presence of the past in our lives today.
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