Time's Echo (eBook)

Jeremy Eichler (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-37055-9 (ISBN)

Infos

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023 'Profoundly moving.' EDMUND DE WAAL 'A work of searching scholarship, acute critical observation, philosophical heft, and deep feeling.' ALEX ROSS 'A rare book: extraordinarily powerful - magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human.' PHILIPPE SANDS A remarkable and stirring account of how music acts as a witness to history and a medium of cultural memory in the post-Holocaust world. 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.

Jeremy Eichler is an award-winning critic, essayist, and cultural historian. A Public Scholar grantee of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has worked as a music critic for The New York Times and, since 2006, has served as chief classical music critic of the Boston Globe. His writing -- which has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Washington Post -- has been recognized with a fellowship from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute and an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music criticism. He lives in Boston.

Textauszug

Chapter One

Emancipating Music

True, for successful excavations a plan is needed.1 Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding, as well. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones, delve to ever-deeper layers.

—Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle”

 

Even stories with a sorry ending have their moments of glory,2 great and small, and it is proper to view these moments, not in the light of their ending, but in their own light: their reality is no less powerful than the reality of their ending.

—Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

 

It is the hiss and crackle of the old recording that first reaches the ear. Then the sound of a string orchestra rumbling to life. Johann Sebastian Bach conceived the music now surging through my headphones—the Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, better known as “the Bach Double”—about three hundred years ago. With today’s technologies, we can summon the sounds of Bach’s vanished world with a few taps on a glass screen, but this wizardly means of playback, rendered banal by habit, forms only the final link in a larger chain of mysteries stemming from a simple yet miraculous fact: that a work of music as a portable archive of emotion and meaning, history and memory, can travel intact through the centuries.

This recording was made by a group of musicians in Vienna on May 29, 1929.3 The hisses and pops are, technically speaking, the product of dust in record grooves, but we may also think of them as, in the poet Osip Mandelstam’s phrase, “the noise of time,” the registration of the great temporal distance this music has crossed to reach us today, like the light from a distant star.4

After the orchestral introduction, the two soloists enter in succession with lines marked by vaulting ten-note leaps; they play with fervor yet also a certain patrician elegance and a honeyed sweetness of tone. In the piece’s lilting slow movement, they trade long-arching phrases in a dialogue of wistfulness and aching beauty. Yet heart and mind can also be at odds in such moments, and it is natural to wonder how much of that ache comes from Bach, or from the performers themselves, and how much comes from us? We tend to hear prewar recordings like this one through ears informed by our knowledge of the catastrophe that lay ahead. This can lend the music an extra sense of pathos, like an old photograph of a loved one unaware of a future we know she has in store. Yet when we listen closely to this particular performance, the music sheds some of its weight. These two soloists, in fact, are not overindulging in the music’s native wistfulness. Their phrases lean forward, not back. They are in fact a father and daughter—Arnold and Alma Rosé—and in 1929 they have scant cause for wistfulness. The conductor is Alma’s brother, Alfred Rosé. Their names are almost forgotten today beyond a small circle of devotees. Yet they are worth recalling, as is the history of promise that gathers behind these notes.

Arnold Rosé (originally Rosenblum)5 was born into a Jewish family in eastern Romania in 1863. Four years later, in 1867, a new constitution lifted many legal restrictions on the empire’s Jews, and the Rosé family migrated west to Vienna, where young Arnold’s rise into the city’s musical firmament was astonishingly swift. By age seventeen, he had been named to a leadership position in the orchestra of the Vienna Court Opera, and he went on to become the revered concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, a chair he held for more than five decades. Lauded by kings and emperors, he embodied musical Vienna with incomparable dignity, dressing often in a cape and riding to performances at the opera in a court carriage. As a young man, he married into musical royalty by wedding Justine Mahler, the sister of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler.

While presiding at the Philharmonic, Rosé also earned renown across Europe as the founder of the Rosé String Quartet, the most celebrated chamber ensemble of the era. With his supreme musical integrity, the group set new standards in the field and was entrusted with premieres by luminaries of the era, including Brahms, whose works they performed with the composer himself at the piano. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Rosé, at Mahler’s urging, also gave landmark performances of radical new works by the audacious young composer Arnold Schoenberg.6 The two Arnolds had more than Mahler’s respect in common.

Born in 1874 as the son of a Jewish shoe shop owner in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg also came of age across the heady decades in which the neue Zeit, the golden age of Austrian liberalism, was breathing its last. Given his commitment to the aesthetic of the avant-garde, Schoenberg’s path to the forefront of German culture would be more tortuous than Rosé’s yet no less dazzling. He boldly fashioned himself as a prophet of music’s future, leading the art form into its own atonal promised land, and he would do so not as a Jew but as a German, a convert to Protestantism, and a fierce defender of all things Teutonic. Accordingly, when he later made his most brilliant theoretical discovery in 1921—the twelve-tone technique of composition—he proudly declared it would ensure the future of German music for a century to come.

Rosé and Schoenberg. The two Arnolds, each in his own way, perfectly embodied a particular nineteenth-century Jewish dream: that of emancipation through culture. Crucially, it was a dream made tangible through a belief in Bildung, an elusive German word for which there is no perfect equivalent in English. Bildung signifies the ideal of personal ennoblement through humanistic education,7 a faith in the ability of literature, music, philosophy, and poetry to renovate the self, to shape one’s moral sensibilities, and to guide one toward a life of aesthetic grace. The miracle of Bildung for the families of the two Arnolds—and countless other Jews lucky enough to be alive as the medieval legal restrictions slowly fell away—was that, theoretically at least, anyone could embrace these ideals of personal transformation on the wings of culture. The life of dignity implicitly promised by Bildung was open to all, regardless of one’s origins (that is, of course, as long as you were male). To trace the thrilling invention of this particular dream, followed by its painful eclipse, it is necessary to begin with music’s role in emancipating German Jews—and the Jewish role in returning the favor, by emancipating German music.

*

In their journey from the ghettos to the urban middle class, many German-speaking Jews of central Europe pursued the Bildung ideal as a kind of surrogate religion, complete with a new set of prophets and sacred books. Some families changed their surnames to Schiller,8 in honor of the great German poet, and it was commonplace for young Jewish boys to be presented with sets of Goethe’s writing on their Bar Mitzvah, as if the knowledge contained within each volume might ever so slightly lighten the burdens of a persecuted past.

Hindsight has made it tempting to cast a skeptical or even scornful eye on the zeal with which so many Jews placed their faith in the liberating powers of German high culture. Such faith, the argument goes, was misguided—a painful delusion and one with ultimately catastrophic consequences. The most iconically sweeping dismissal of this notion of a symbiosis between Jews and German culture came from the great Israeli scholar of mysticism Gershom Scholem, himself a German Jew born in Berlin. After the war, responding to an invitation to contribute to a volume on German-Jewish dialogue, he wrote, “I deny that there has ever been such a German-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever…. It takes two to have a dialogue,9 who listen to each other…. This dialogue died at its very start and never took place.”

Scholem’s vehemence was understandable; he was speaking about a relationship whose dissolution he witnessed firsthand. Perhaps he had in mind the case of his friend Walter Benjamin, the stratospherically gifted German-Jewish critic whose strangely luminous prose had penetrated like an X-ray through European history and culture. After the Nazis came to power, Benjamin had been hounded across Europe before ultimately taking his own life in 1940 on the border between France and Spain. In his, as in so many...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.9.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik
• Themenwelt: Schulbuch / Wörterbuch ► Lexikon / Chroniken
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
• ISBN-10: 0-571-37055-1 / 0571370551
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-37055-9 / 9780571370559