By Jonathan Blumhofer

Jeremy Eichler calls on hearers to engage in “deep listening,” by which he means engaging the mind and heart not just with the music, but also with the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts that gave rise to it.

Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, And The Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler. Alfred A. Knopf, 386 pp., $30

“Music,” Victor Hugo once noted, “expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” Perhaps as a result, the artform stands, as Jeremy Eichler argues in his absorbing and eloquent book Time’s Echo, as a singularly potent force for channeling collective memory and memorialization.

Eichler, the chief classical music critic for the Boston Globe, centers his focus on music by four composers — Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten — written in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust. These works serve to form (to borrow from Theodor Adorno) a set of “unconscious chronicles” of the age. Accordingly, a significant part of the narrative involves a mix of history, analysis, and interpretation.

Throughout, Eichler proves an articulate, wise guide. He grounds his telling in the story of Germany’s Jewish population, which, in the course of not 70 years, saw the pendulum swing from full emancipation in Otto von Bismarck’s Second Reich to the gas chambers of the Third.

Through those decades ran the through-current of Bildung, a Romantic notion that culture has a purifying, elevating effect on a person’s character. With enough of it, the thinking went, individuals could improve their social standing. While fin de siècle German Jews understandably embraced the concept with alacrity, this idealistic aspiration was no match for the passions of nationalism, antisemitism, and pseudo-science that erupted in the first decades of the 20th century.

Strauss, Time’s Echo’s first subject, was the leading German musical light of those years. In fact, he had no use for Bildung, rejecting the concept for a detached, ironic, Nietzschean worldview whose antiestablishment ideals found their way into his first great hits, the dazzling tone poems of the 1880s and ’90s, and, later, his operas.

His relationship with the Nazis has long formed the most tortured part of his biography. Eichler navigates the composer’s infuriating contradictions, moral blind spots, and political naïveté in the 1930s and ’40s with judicious restraint. Certainly, Strauss had good reason to not aggravate the regime: his daughter-in-law was Jewish (as, by Nazi standards, were his grandsons).

But his unwillingness (or inability) to clearly see what was going on around him led to a raft of unfortunate decisions, from fulfilling high-profile commissions for the regime to unhesitatingly taking on conducting dates for colleagues either banned by the government (the Jewish Bruno Walter) or quitting the country in protest (the antifascist Arturo Toscanini), and more.

Strauss could hardly plead innocence: his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig implored him, as Eichler recounts, to wake up to current events. But the composer didn’t, even after the Gestapo intercepted letters between him and Zweig in which Strauss denigrated the Nazi’s anti-Jewish policies and declared himself to be working above and outside politics.

Stripped of his official position, Strauss spent the war years churning out operas, songs, and concertos. He managed to save the lives of his daughter-in-law and grandsons; Zweig, by contrast, emigrated from Salzburg to Brazil where, in 1942, he and his wife committed suicide.

What Strauss was thinking at this time is somewhat hard to say, as his most sensitive papers remain under the family’s lock and key (a fact Eichler relays with an appreciable mix of incredulity and exasperation). While maintaining his professed apolitical stance, Strauss composed a string of works that, remarkably, bear no outward acknowledgment of the world on fire around him. The exception to this rule came only in the waning days of the war.

His indifference ruffled after he witnessed the aftermath of the destruction of his hometown of Munich (and particularly its storied opera house) by Allied air raids, Strauss penned Metamorphosen. A 30-minute-long elegy for 23 strings, the work ends with a quotation of the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Underneath that spot in the score, Strauss wrote the words “IN MEMORIAM!”

Who or what, exactly, is being memorialized remains unclear: Strauss never gave his reference-point away and Eichler doesn’t uncover anything definitive. Yet the critic’s various interpretations of Metamorphosen — all of which are woven from various strands of Strauss’s and his culture’s historical record — are plausible and provide new ways of hearing and understanding this mysterious work.

While Strauss ultimately sought refuge in the abstract world of instrumental music, Arnold Schoenberg embraced the voice: both his own and that of his fellow Jews.

Unlike his slightly older contemporary, Schoenberg understood all too well what the Nazis were about. He left Germany in 1933, settling in Los Angeles by way of Boston (apparently an unpleasant winter caused him to seek friendlier climes).

Already controversial on account of his musical innovations, the Jewish-born Protestant convert rediscovered the faith of his fathers, reconverting to Judaism and, for a time, becoming politically active. When the last undertaking — which involved Schoenberg almost militantly embracing the Zionist cause — eventually petered out, the composer channeled his energies into a pair of works: the opera Moses und Aron and A Survivor from Warsaw.

The former, in Eichler’s view, can be read as a telling of German Jewish history up through the arrival of the Nazis. Survivor, meanwhile, recounts the aftermath. Just seven minutes long, the score relates the tale of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943.

Combining a narration of Schoenberg’s invention with a setting for men’s voices of the “Shema Yisrael,” the piece was written on a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation. Qualms about its content, though, caused leading conductors to back away. Ultimately, Survivor’s premiere was held in, of all places, a high school gymnasium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in October 1947.

Despite the setting, Survivor was received rapturously — an especially remarkable feat given that it is written in Schoenberg’s most uncompromising atonal style. Yet that very sound world seemed to have made visceral, at least for a moment, the harrowing experiences the music aims to depict.

It wasn’t long, though, before Survivor fell out of favor, as much for its gritty first-person narration and depictions of violence as for its larger premise. The West German premiere, in 1950, only went forward after a narrow vote of confidence from the musicians and, in the United States, several critics (including Jewish writers) suggested that Schoenberg was unjustifiably exploiting the fate of his compatriots. Such charges continue to dog the work.

At least Schoenberg addressed the Holocaust head-on: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem avoids explicit mention of the subject entirely. That’s a curious feature of one of the century’s major works, which was written for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962 (the original edifice was destroyed in a Nazi air raid in 1940).

Of course, the omission is not damnatory: since the score so profoundly reflects the composer’s pacifism (Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, registered as conscientious objectors during World War II), that actually makes some sense. Perhaps more importantly, it underlines the larger context of British Holocaust remembrance which, as Eichler points out, was shockingly belated and incomplete at the time of the War Requiem’s premiere.

Instead of addressing the Holocaust, per se, the War Requiem, with its stark juxtaposition of Wilfred Owen’s World War I–era poetry and the liturgy of the Latin funeral mass, meditates on the futility of conflict and violence, generally; it doesn’t distinguish between “good” wars and “bad.” Rather, it indicts the state (and the church) that promotes and blesses (overtly or not) destruction.

Given this situation, one might understand the work’s lack of Holocaust referencing as part of a larger attempt on Britten’s part to exceed the temporal and instead address the universal conundrum of human conflict (ironically, by way of poetry from an earlier 20th-century war). Its narrative, after all, provides not just a memory space but a haunting reminder that humanity transcends borders, races, and political ideologies.

Eichler doesn’t really examine the piece from this angle, though one wishes that he had: such a tack might add some depth to his larger discussion of the composition: after all, as the author notes, the War Requiem functions on multiple levels simultaneously. Besides, it’s not as though Britten was oblivious to what happened in the concentration camps. In the summer of 1945, he accompanied Yehudi Menuhin on a recital tour that included a stop at Bergen-Belsen. He emerged from the experience scarred for the rest of his life.

Like Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich wasn’t blind to what was going on around him. And, like Strauss, he had a complex relationship with an authoritarian government. Unlike his German counterpart, however, the Russian master’s situation was lifelong and Shostakovich was evidently made of sterner moral stuff. As a result, though his career involved countless maneuverings and compromises with Soviet authorities, a quiet defiance emerges in various of his works.

In particular, Shostakovich was much taken with Jewish music and, perhaps partly through that, developed a deep sympathy with Jewish victims of oppression. This attitude ran counter to Soviet policy, which was frequently antisemitic.

When the composer set Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” to music in the early ’60s he was challenging official doctrine. Namely, that Jews were the chief victims among the tens of thousands slaughtered by the Nazis at the eponymous ravine in Kiev — not just good, patriotic “Russians.” The piece inevitably brought questions about the complicity of Soviet citizens in the murders (as well as the regime’s more recent anti-Jewish measures) uncomfortably to the fore.

The setting of Yevtushenko’s poem forms the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13. Its subsequent four sections deal with other aspects of Soviet society: satire of the powerful, a paean to the strength of Soviet women, the terrors of Stalinist repression, and the toxicity of conformity in Russian society. Hardly the stuff of Socialist uplift, the Symphony’s premiere in December 1962 was muted in the press (the audience in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, on the other hand, was evidently ecstatic). Remarkably, the original score wasn’t published in Russia until 2006.

Today, with another war of aggression (this one provoked by Russia) being waged in Ukraine, the poem’s opening observation that “Over Babi Yar there is no monument” continues to ring true: in the early days of the latest conflict, Russian missiles struck the now filled-in ravine. And yet the place has a marker — not in it, of course, but for it — in the form of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony.

Here we get the crux of Eichler’s argument: while physical memorials decay (or are removed or destroyed), their musical equivalents are more meaningful and endurable. They last in the mind and heart. What’s more, they’re not like statues that gather soot and grime; the musical type, though they hail from the distant past, are things that actively converse with us in the present.

Of course, they don’t just do this by themselves: in order to engage with these memorials on a meaningful level, a certain contextual understanding is necessary. Essentially, the question of what is being applauded or cheered and why needs to be asked and answered again and again.

To do this, audiences should not be allowed to be passive. Instead, Eichler calls on hearers to engage in “deep listening,” by which he means engaging the mind and heart not just with the music, but also with the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts that gave rise to it. Only then can we approach them with some true measure of understanding. The alternative, the critic argues, is dispiriting: we have “the disconnected sounds of a Schubert symphony streaming into an empty room. We have ‘classics for relaxing.’ Without deep listening, the voices of the past are whispering into the void.”

So we’re left with a formidable challenge. But it’s a necessary one: as antisemitism, authoritarianism, historical and political shortsightedness and illiteracy — not to mention hypocrisy of every stripe — seem to run more rampant with each passing moment, the “voices of the past” offer us warnings, encouragements, and guidance. We’d do well to hear and heed them before we unnecessarily repeat history’s tragic mistakes.

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Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.