Sikorski
This work is inspired by the letters of Emma Hauck. Emma Hauck was committed in 1909 to a psychiatric institution in Germany, where she was diagnosed with what was then termed dementia praecox. During her confinement, she wrote numerous letters to her husband, writing only two words “Herzensschatzi, komm” (“Darling, come”) thousands of times, covering entire sheets. None were ever delivered.
I see Hauck’s letters not as fragile documents of illness, but as relentless attempts to reshape reality through the power of the written word, aligned with archaic notions of Logos, where naming is a creative act, and repetition becomes invocation. Hauck’s writing is an expression of longing, a desperate need to assert existence, to rupture the reality that enclosed her and call into being a world in which her husband’s arrival might liberate her from physical and inner imprisonment.
Hauck’s letters were published in Hans Prinzhorn’s seminal 1922 publication Bildnerei der Geisteskranken. Prinzhorn approached such works not as pathological symptoms, but as autonomous acts of expression shaped by inner necessity. This view later influenced Jean Dubuffet’s concept of Art Brut: a form of creation driven by existential compulsion rather than cultural validation.
This piano work does not seek to recreate Hauck’s letters, nor to narrate or illustrate them. Instead, the music responds to their inner pressure, to what is contained, withheld, and ultimately unattainable.
I was introduced to the letters of Emma Hauck by my dear friend and great poet Emily Fragos. When Emily learned that I was composing this piece, she sent me her poem:
The Letters of Emma Hauck
Come the labyrinth,
come the curdling word, the black ladder,
that tears a hole through the asylum’s roof,
troposphere, stratosphere, to make for us
our own anesthesia, lullaby-and-goodnight,
sweet love. Pleased to wear rags around the mouth
and nose to contain our essence from seeping,
weighted down by gauze, just barely, to keep
us here, by what kind of what.
Emily Fragos
Lera Auerbach, 2026