In Time’s Echo, the award-winning critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler makes a passionate and revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.

With a critic’s ear, a scholar’s erudition, and a novelist’s eye for detail, Eichler shows how four towering composers—Richard Strauss [Metamophosen], Arnold Schoenberg [A Survivor from Warsaw], Dmitri Shostakovich [Symphony No. 13, Babi Yar], and Benjamin Britten [War Requiem]—lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving, transcendent works of music, scores that echo lost time.