Prologue: In the Shade of an Oak Tree 011
Part 1
Chapter 1.
Liberate Music 037
Chapter 2.
Dancing in the Thorns 074
Chapter 3.
Torn Half 106
Chapter 4.
Beneath the Waves 141
Chapter 5.
Liberation of Memory 182
Chapter 6.
Moses of Albuquerque 226
Part 2
Chapter 7.
263 on the other coast
Chapter 8.
Angel of History 291
Chapter 9.
Light of the Last Moment 329
Chapter 10.
Monument 384
Coda: Listening to Lost Time 409

Acknowledgments 420
Week 426
Search 480
Translator's Note 489

Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Strauss, Britten. The aesthetics of mourning as seen through the works of four composers.

Music is a light and abstract art, but every note is rooted in history and the earth.
Jeremy Eichler, one of the greatest music writers, captures this duality brilliantly in Music of Mourning.
This book traces the lives of four composers who are at the forefront of European classical music, breaking through the dark heart of the 20th century.
The war-scarred monuments they each created are remarkable in themselves, but they are also noteworthy in that they look back on the past while also turning our heads toward our own times, opening our perspectives to the world in which the music was created.


World War II was a global disaster, from Asia to Europe.
And it cracked the tightly woven fabric of humanity.
Somewhere in the midst of this darkness was the Holocaust.
Just as traumatic experiences haunt an individual's memories for a lifetime, this incident continues to stir up the historical memory of Western society.
Theodor Adorno, a German Jewish philosopher, critic, and musical sage, said, “The idea that culture will be revived after Auschwitz is an illusion and meaningless.
But since the world has endured its own end, art must become its unconscious chronicler.”
Based on this reasoning, the author focuses on music in particular among the arts and examines its role as an “unconscious chronicle.”
The music that witnessed history and conveyed that memory to the post-Genocide world is the subject of this book.

Sounds of Lost Time - A Historical Lament by Four Composers

This book features four pieces of music that cut through some of the darkest history of the 20th century West.
These are Strauss's "Metamorphosen," Schoenberg's "Warsaw Survivor," Britten's "War Requiem," and Shostakovich's "Babi Yar" symphony.
Although they are all masterpieces that will remain in the history of music, they are not easy to accept as they deal with death in a comprehensive way.
Through these songs, through the lives of those who created them, and through individual moments in the sociocultural history of music, the author offers a new perspective on the wartime past.

In the midst of war and madness, how did these songs represent human memory, mourning, and weaving history and emotion? The music of these musicians, who testified to history through music, speaks in different languages, yet all bear witness to the same truth.
Music is the final form of memory, the way humans remain human.


Let's take a brief look at the four musicians who are the main characters in this book.

* Shostakovich, who had to live under the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, is a symbolic figure who showed how art can preserve human dignity even under surveillance and fear.
He composed 'music of silence' amid the violence of history.
His Symphony No. 5 (1937) was ostensibly interpreted as a 'hymn to socialist heroism', but in reality it was a work filled with the irony and sorrow of an oppressed age.
The audience heard “joy in sorrow,” and power heard “music of loyalty.”
His music, which operates with a double meaning, is like a diary recording the suffocating silence of a totalitarian era.

* Schoenberg, from Austria, is the founder of the dissolution of tonality, that is, dissonance and twelve-tone technique, and is a figure who created a revolutionary turning point in the history of music.
His works from the 1930s, such as Moses und Aron and String Quartet No. 2, were not mere formal experiments, but musical representations of war, exile, and the silence of God.
As Hitler's persecution of the Jews began, Schoenberg fled to the United States, an experience expressed in his music as a sense of the collapse of 'a tonality (order).'
In this book, the author calls him “the philosopher of dissonance.”
In his music, dissonance was not chaos, but ethical awakening.
He had the awareness of the times that “beauty alone cannot save humanity.”


* Strauss is a figure who left behind a complex evaluation as he lived through the Nazi era.
He made certain compromises with the system, but at the same time tried not to lose human dignity and the purity of art.
His later masterpiece, Metamorphosen (1945), is read as music of mourning and repentance for the ruined German culture immediately following the fall of the Nazis.
The deep sadness flowing beneath the classical form was a funeral march played by an era for itself.
* Britain's Briton was a pacifist representing the war generation.
His masterpiece, War Requiem (1962), was a chorus of reconciliation sung by the dead and the living, enemies and allies.
This book reads Britten's music as a “form of mourning and reconciliation.”
His music was not simply an expression of sorrow, but a form of ethical remembrance, a symbol of the belief that human beings can only recover by remembering one another.

Through their music, the author restores the topography of mourning hidden within the history of music, and through its notes and melodies, he revisits the inner workings of history, namely, the question, "How do humans remember what they have lost?"

Music in History - A Chronicle of Sound Documenting an Age of Sorrow

In an age where debates over which history should be commemorated and which should be reinterpreted intensify, the author points out that music preserves the past in the form of intense emotional experiences.
As a historian who values ​​precision and intuitively feels the fervent heat of music, he presents four dramatically different works born from the same impulse in a lucid and moving chronicle.


Music has always existed alongside the shadows of the times.
Having experienced two world wars in the 20th century, humans left behind music as a language of sorrow.
Strauss's "Metamorphosen" is a dirge dedicated to German culture, and Shostakovich's symphonies are not mere works of art but records of the times.
This book examines the social background and philosophical context in which these songs were created, proving that music is the oldest form of human memory.


The Aesthetics of Mourning: Human Artistic Ways to Endure Grief

《Mourning Music》 is a humanistic attempt to read music as the ‘language of sorrow.’
However, it does not stop at just the feeling of tragedy.
The mourning this book deals with is art as an ethical sensibility.
The author believes that, among all arts, music functions as a 'form that allows humans to endure' sadness without romanticizing it.
From that perspective, he persuasively demonstrates, moving between the languages ​​of psychoanalysis, theology, and aesthetics, that “mourning is not a state of static sadness, but a movement toward art.”
Empathizing with the ways in which Sebald, Benjamin, and Adorno view disappearing things and premature loss, he develops a variety of experiments in which music and history fascinate each other.


The author speaks of how music, at the intersection of history and art, remembers the wounds of an era, but ultimately, this is read as speaking of humanity.
Because to mourn is to remember, and to listen is to become human again.
As the original title of this book, 'Time's Echo', suggests, "music is the voice of a vanished era and the most complete testimony to the time humans have lost."

As the author states in the preface that he used a critic's ear and a historian's tools in writing this book, the book is as rich in historical narrative as it is in music.
The writing, meticulously researched and filled with deep emotion, adds to the pleasure of exploration.
This is an inspiring book, full of sharp critical observations and a philosophical weight that explores the dark shadows that have plagued human life and art.
I recommend that you read all the notes at the end of the text.