‘Should genocide really be the stuff of a night out at Carnegie Hall?’ asks Jeremy Eichner, author of Time's Echo, (Faber, 400pp, £21).
Some would say no. That's why, at many performances of Arnold Schoenberg's , the audience are asked not to clap. But, argues Eichner, you cannot blame composers who lived through the Second World War for seeking to memorialize their experience of it. Approaching his task with ‘the ears of a critic’ – he, Strauss's , Shostakovich's and Britten's .
