Book Reviews 61

Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance

Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance
Jeremy Eichler Knopf
386 pages. ills.
$30
ISBN: 978-0525521716

You might be expecting a standard study of four war-related musical pieces: Strauss’ Metamorphosen (1945), Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) and, from 1962, Britten’s War Requiem and Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony. Such a book would move through the composers’ lives, describe the works’ composition, comment on a Walter Benjaminesque “constellation” of related pieces and set it all in the context of historical events before relating and assessing their reception and delicately stepping into the minefield of “meaning.” But while Eichler does do much of that, he is attempting much more. In an explicitly Sebaldian text he argues that these pieces are not simply memorialisations but that through deep listening and reflecting on the inciting events we can superadditively enhance our understanding of both music and history.

Despite being responses to particular events, Strauss’ and Britten’s works relate to the Second World War or war in general, unlike Shostakovich’s and (ambiguously) Schoenberg’s, which are more directly inspired by the Holocaust. Eichler weaves through the permutations of composers and works and events, drawing parallels and pointing differences and historical ironies.

Part One, the “German” half of the book, looks at Strauss and Schoenberg. After a brief contemplation of the German concept of “culture,” Eichler uses the Mendelssohn family and circle as his nexus to study the history of Jews and German culture from the pre-1871 German states onwards, and how they attempted to balance their Judaism and Germanness. As this continues into the 20th century Schoenberg and Strauss are brought into the discussion. Strauss, sometimes condemned as a Nazi lackey for his work at the Reichsmusikkammer, is presented in more complex light: aware of Nazi anti-Semitism and trying to protect his Jewish relatives and colleagues (including librettist Stefan Zweig), making calculated (to him) concessions while egotistically believing he could face the enemy down. It isn’t altogether a fresh view of the composer but it is welcome in its subtlety.

Ironically, as Strauss manoeuvred to successfully premiere Die Schweigsame Frau, Schoenberg was working on the never-to-be-completed Moses und Aron. One cannot fail to notice the relative fates of the two composers, as we read of Schoenberg, far from his German home, and struggling with Hebrew while setting A Survivor from Warsaw before its premiere, held—bizarrely—in a school gymnasium in Albuquerque. There is also a foreshadowing of Shostakovich as Die Schweigsame Frau was quickly banned, just a few months before the same fate befell Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

Strauss and Schoenberg composed their works in the turbulent years immediately following the war, when the full extent and horror of the Holocaust was finally being revealed and the world was struggling to take in the enormity of the crimes. By 1962, when Britten and Shostakovich were writing their works, it was a relatively well-studied phenomenon.

But this is a book in part about different national responses to the War and the Holocaust. The UK still has a strange relationship to it: the island that did not succumb; the country that saved Europe from Nazism; war films on Sunday afternoon TV and the eternal glory of the 1966 World Cup (though popular culture has no place in Eichler’s pages). Of course, 1962 was not entirely like that (we hadn’t won the World Cup yet) but the bombing of Coventry Cathedral was still seen as putting the nation’s wartime suffering on a par with the rest of Europe. As the Queen Mother said after Buckingham Palace was bombed: “Now we can look the East End in the face.” Britten and Pears had been in the USA for the first part of the war and when they returned, they registered as conscientious objectors. If they had a degree of detachment, that evaporated when Britten accompanied Menuhin on a tour of German displaced persons camps: could he not have contemplated what might have happened to a homosexual and a Jew under the Nazis?

Basil Spence’s resurrection of Coventry Cathedral, wrapping his modern design around the bombed out remains, symbolised British desires for newness combined with a respect for tradition; a year after the War Requiem was premiered Prime Minister Harold Wilson would implore the country to embrace “the white heat of technology.” In a sense, combining the words of the Mass with those of wartime poet Wilfred Owen was a parallel. But the War Requiem has surprisingly little to do with the larger phenomenon of World War Two. Owen did not die then but years earlier, a few days before the end of what Britons then called “The Great War,” and the work itself is dedicated to friends of Britten who were victims of the war—not to the millions of others and not to victims of the Holocaust. Even the most explicit reference—having Pears, Fischer-Dieskau and Vishnevskaya as soloists to represent three of the major antagonists coming together in reconciliation—was a tacit one and was in any case scuppered by the Soviets’ refusal to release their star soprano. Hence there’s a tension in what is being memorialised, underscored by the importance of the tritone and the fact that the spatially separated performers only coalesce uneasily. This tension has greater resonance when one thinks of how in the years after the war the UK sometimes minimised the Holocaust in public debate.

When I wrote above that in the early 1960s the Holocaust was a “relatively well-studied phenomenon,” I had in mind how the Soviets had carefully edited the “history” of Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) in line with postwar policies at home and abroad, a rewriting that had begun even while Strauss was composing Metamorphosen.

Nazi atrocities on Soviet soil were briefly used to garner sympathy from the West; journalism by Ehrenburg, Grossman, Simonov and others was published (though sometimes censored); and several 1940s poems more or less directly referenced the atrocity. But the “anticosmopolitanism” policy soon arose and the Jewish victims of Babyn Yar were Sovietised. In 1945 the Ukrainian composer Dmytro Klebanov’s First Symphony, dedicated to Babyn Yar, was suppressed. Eighteen years later, the Thaw may have seemed a different time, but even so Yevtushenko’s poem and Shostakovich’s symphony struck like a thunderbolt.

Seventy-one years later, the literature about Babyn Yar is huge, and for those acquainted with it, Eichler is probably simply adding to the catalogue of horrors. But such witnessing, even repeatedly, is necessary.

Many of Eichler’s Shostakovichian sources will be familiar to DSCH readers (including a couple of references to the Journal itself) but interesting sidelights include a CIA memo decrying the “enslavement” of Soviet artists such as the composer. As with the “German” part of the book, he begins by discussing Shostakovich’s place in Soviet culture from the war onwards, here with a focus on the Second Piano Trio, though when it comes to the symphony, he focuses on Yevtushenko’s text. He wraps up with thoughts on the irony that, contra Yevtushenko, there are now many memorials at Babyn Yar, but tells how hard it was to find the specific site where the atrocity took place when he visited. His story of seeing sunbathers among the tombstones reminded me of visiting the Fallen Monument Park in Moscow and seeing young mothers walking their children among the statues—Stalin and Lenin and the Dzerzhinsky that had stood outside the NKVD headquarters. But despite that proliferation of Babyn Yar memorials, for Eichler the symphony retains a special place not simply as a memorial to the event but as a memorial to the forgetting of the event. Then, with the final twist, Russia bombed the site on 22 March 2022. And now a statue of Dzerzhinsky has been re-erected.

The Holocaust is, of course, a vast topic that has been covered and memorialised countless times in every artistic medium. Though the three films of Andrzej Wajda’s “War Trilogy” (1955–58) deal with the Warsaw Uprising and its repercussions, they have little to do with A Survivor from Warsaw. It’s an unsurprising omission, but it might have been nice to engage with Milan Kundera’s essays on the composer, one of which is, in this context piquantly, entitled “Forgetting Schoenberg”, describing A Survivor from Warsaw as “the greatest musical monument written about the Holocaust. People fight to ensure the murders are not forgotten—and then forget Schoenberg.” (Une rencontre, Paris: Gallimard, 2009.)

Probably for the sake of accessibility Eichler eschews music examples, preferring to rely on evocative prose and readers who don’t already know those works may well be encouraged to discover them. His avoidance of MacDonald-like specificities goes as far as remaining agnostic on the link between the finale of the Second Piano Trio and stories of Jews being forced to dance before execution. But that approach is only spottily used and Eichler sometimes seems to prefer to engage with the texts or the context rather than the music. So, while there’s a thorough rundown on Russian/Soviet anti-Semitism and the tortured history of the Thirteenth Symphony and the textual alterations, there’s less about what it actually sounds like than there is on opus 67. Similarly, he is content simply to describe the dance around the golden calf in Moses und Aron as “some of the most kaleidoscopically brilliant music Schoenberg would ever create.” In the imaginary book I described in my first paragraph, that would be a hitch and an annoyance, but given that Eichler’s expressed aim is dependent on deeper listening, to occasionally leave the reader to their own devices on that front is a more serious flaw, albeit one that doesn’t run through the entire book. Adorno claimed that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric (“nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch”). If we disagree, then to analyse one, or its musical setting, is a valid action. But it is one from which Eichler sometimes retreats.

From a historical and cultural perspective, Time’s Echo is very thoroughly researched, with 61 pages of notes that will surely send interested readers to the library. But, annoyingly and as is increasingly common with popular history, Knopf has abandoned numbered footnotes, leaving readers repeatedly flicking to the back just in case something is referenced. It also means a couple of notable points go unsupported. Finally, the beginning of what I suspect was a long, interesting, and useful footnote to page 232 has gone AWOL.

Nevertheless, this is a fascinating attempt to push the understanding of music and history. Anyone interested in the composers under discussion, cultural history or the hermeneutics of music will gain greatly from it.

John Leman Riley
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amazon.com / amazon.co.uk

Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5
Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker
Oxford University Press
192 pages.
$18.95
ISBN: 978-0197566329

hen it comes to understanding the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, there is no battleground finer than that of the Fifth Symphony. Its position at the top of Socialist Realism’s encroachment upon the art of music, its status as a turning point in Shostakovich’s style, and its irresistible music have combined to make it a familiar friend on the stage and the page. Implicit in many anglophone writings of the last 45 years has been a “phantom program” of sorts, concerned with cleansing Shostakovich of the taint of the Soviet state.1 This most recent work by Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker represents the most recent attempt to rise above the politically interested discourse of that “phantom program” and to instead place the Fifth in a properly historicised contextual nest.

The great achievement of this book is the construction of that nest. The first two chapters masterfully lay out the historical and musical context necessary to understand the composition of the Fifth, telling a full story of its creation and reception and enumerating in detail its musical sources. Much has been written about the influences of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler on Shostakovich’s Fifth, but rarely has that discussion found such a balance between approachability and depth. The authors take their analysis beyond the known influences as well, drawing fertile connections to the music of Hindemith and Bizet.

Running parallel to the musical history of the Fifth are the historical and intellectual histories of the early Soviet Union. In detailing this history, the authors reach for a deep well of Russian-language sources to paint one of the most complete and nuanced pictures of Shostakovich’s political drama to date. The most compelling aspects of the authors’ narrative circle around what they characterise as three streams of reception to the Fifth Symphony, those being two disparate public receptions and the embattled critical one. Receiving due emphasis in this drama is the complex intermingling of Soviet officials, artists, and intelligentsia in the long gap between the Fifth’s premiere in Leningrad and Alexei Tolstoy’s glowing review in Izvestia, which famously decided Shostakovich’s fate to the good.2 Adding further richness is a turn toward how the Fifth was received and interpreted in Western Europe and the United States. The question of what the Fifth has meant to its audiences is given its full due, and the whole is immaculately researched and brilliantly rendered.

It is not until the authors shift from historical interpretations to their own that problems start to arise. One such passage, in Chapter 3 (“The Phantom Program”), hints at a pattern of interpretive missteps. The end of the chapter (p. 72) focuses on the critique of Iosif Ryzhkin, who maligns Shostakovich’s symphony as a “Prince Hamlet of the Mtsensk District.” The Hamlet insinuation accuses the work of being an act of asocial navelgazing, distasteful in the time of nation-building, and the mention of the Mtsensk District charges it with being both provincial and of the same cloth as Shostakovich’s ill-fated opera. We also learn (p. 74) of The List of Benefits (Spisok Blagodeianiy), a play by Yuri Olesha. In this play, a Soviet actress seeking expressive freedom flees to Paris, where her portrayal of Hamlet temporarily wins over western audiences. When she is later killed on the streets of Paris she requests that her body be covered in a red banner. That banner was interpreted squarely by Soviet critics as an insufficient, cosmetic attempt at redemption.3

In the final paragraphs of the chapter (p. 77), the authors deliver a beautiful synthesis on how the spectre of Hamlet bears on the interpretation of the Fifth, writing that “[t]he coda of his finale was like a red banner draped over the corpse of Hamlet. The phantom program of the Fifth could, in the end, cut both ways.” The metaphor appears apt: if the coda is Shostakovich’s own red banner, then questions must abound as to its effectiveness. Could such a manoeuvre truly convince his official overseers of his reform? Or, as it was for Olesha’s actress, was it simply too little, too late?

That interpretive ambiguity is at the heart of understanding this work, and so it was to my dismay when only a few sentences later (p. 77) the authors write that “[t]he clear consensus was that the finale represented the submission of an individual to the collective will.” Was it? We know from earlier in this very book (pp. 21–25) that such critics as Andrei Budiakovsky and Nikolai Shastin harboured reservations about the sincerity of Shostakovich’s submission, and Ryzhkin’s sharp criticism certainly contravenes the author’s claim (p. 75). Ryzhkin even compares the composer to someone standing on the threshold of an open door (that of Soviet society), unable or unwilling to walk through it. Where once we had an open question the authors now attempt to supply a definite answer.

Another such quashing of ambiguity follows in Chapter 5 (“A Formula for Triumph”). It is here (p. 113) that the authors take head-on the semiotic possibilities of the coda. A glance at the sonata-form processes of the finale provides a fascinating and much-needed question about Shostakovich’s biggest compositional decision: why, when he might have “delighted his listeners with a soaring apotheosis” by giving the secondary theme its home key resolution, did he instead cut to the coda and its thudding repetition? The authors supply an answer: “If he had simply allowed [the secondary theme] to have its expected apotheosis, this would have been entirely acceptable, and indeed welcome as a conclusion of a Socialist Realist symphony. Instead, Shostakovich damages the movement for his own purposes, not out of submission to the Soviet state, but rather to hold something back that the state cannot have.”

This is a most appealing claim. In the authors’ reading the coda was not, as has been long imagined, the site of artistic mediation, but in fact a masterstroke that both substantively denied and pragmatically satisfied the Soviet state its demands for reform.4 Thus Shostakovich the composer retains his autonomy and Shostakovich the man is untainted by distasteful capitulation to a totalitarian state. Here is our “phantom program” made material once more, and in an argument that is just as untenable now as it was in the wave of writings following Testimony. There is one novel wrinkle in the authors’ claim worth taking apart, not least because it underscores the implausibility of their reading. Implicit in their argument is the notion that the counterfactual finale, the one with the “soaring apotheosis,” would have been an even more convincing Socialist Realist project. It is a great stretch to imagine that, given that choice, Shostakovich would have chosen a markedly riskier option in that dark year of 1937.

There is yet one more startling juxtaposition between the sixth chapter of the book and the postlude. Chapter 6 (“The End of the Affair”) turns away from the historical work of the preceding chapters and engages in a hermeneutical exercise instead. At task here is the “discovery” by pianist and composer Alexander Benditsky that the programme of Shostakovich’s Fifth is actually a romantic interest by the name of Elena Konstaninovskaya (a.k.a. Lala Carmen), the latter name supposedly leading Shostakovich to lace the work with A (for Lala), C (for Carmen), and references to Bizet’s Carmen. In fact, the authors argue that “the Fifth is profoundly imbued with the music of Bizet’s Carmen, and that this was the result of deliberate planning on the part of the composer. The dense network of both musical and biographical evidence is enough to establish Benditsky’s thesis beyond any reasonable doubt” (p. 127.) The analysis that follows presents a handful of compelling connections between the Fifth and Bizet’s opera, but ventures more often into a methodology steeped in Richard Taruskin’s “poietic fallacy,” and even, as might be gathered by the language of their claim, the intentional fallacy.5 That is to say that the authors place too great an emphasis on the making of the work and over-implicate the aural connections between Benditsky’s hidden programme and Shostakovich’s work. The connections are intriguing to consider, and Carmen may well have been on Shostakovich’s mind during the composition of the Fifth, but such threads are unlikely to radically shift how we perceive the piece come concert day.

In all, Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker present a rich and thought-provoking look into Shostakovich’s most popular symphony. The whole is immaculately researched and brilliantly presented, and any reader will come away with a deeper understanding of the man, the circumstances, and the work. The authors too often follow perfect questions with their own flawed answers, but it will be seen that these moments do not outweigh the rich context and thoughtful discussion that characterises the book as a whole.

Notes:

On the scholarly side, see g., Alan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, Shostakovich Reconsidered (London: Toccata Press, 1998); on the lay side, see e.g., Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990).
Alexei Tolstoy, “Pyataya simfoniya Shostakovicha,” Izvestiya, 28 December
As an example, one critic writes that “Hamlet will not cease to be Hamlet just because he is covered by a red banner.” Violetta Gudkova, Yuriĭ Olesha i Vsevolod Meyerkhhol’d v rabote nad spektaklem “Spisok blagodeianiĭ” (opyt teatral’noĭ arkheologii), 501.
v. Richard Taruskin, “Public lies and unspeakable truth interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony” in Shostakovich Studies Vol. 1, ed. David Fanning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Richard Taruskin, “The Poietic Fallacy” The Musical Times 145, no. 1886 (Spring 2004), 7–34. https://doi. org/10.2307/4149092. Taruskin defines the poietic fallacy (on 11 of the article) as “the conviction that what matters most (or more strongly yet, that all that matters) in a work of art is the making of it, the maker’s input.”

Declan Siefkas
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