Love Letters of Emma Hauck is a solo piano work inspired by the letters of Emma Hauck, who was committed to a psychiatric institution in Germany in 1909. During her confinement, she wrote numerous letters to her husband, repeatedly covering pages with the words “Herzensschatzi, komm,” “Darling, come.” None of the letters were delivered.

The music does not attempt to illustrate the letters as documents. It responds instead to their inner pressure: the insistence of a voice trying to reach beyond the walls enclosing it, the transformation of repetition into invocation, and the longing to call another reality into being.

• Form One-movement solo piano work.
• Duration Approximately 12 minutes.
• Forces Solo piano.

Emma Hauck’s letters became known through Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 study Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, a publication that helped shift attention from pathology alone toward autonomous acts of expression shaped by inner necessity. Prinzhorn’s thinking later became important for the formation of Jean Dubuffet’s idea of Art Brut.

Auerbach’s response places Hauck’s writing in the realm of Logos: the ancient idea that naming can be a creative act. In this reading, repetition is not merely symptom or ornament. It is a desperate and sacred grammar, a repeated call that tries to rupture reality itself.

The composer was introduced to Hauck’s letters by the poet Emily Fragos, whose poem The Letters of Emma Hauck became part of the work’s imaginative atmosphere.

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