Major works in this program are Schulhoff’s Sextet, Steve Reich’s Different Trains, and Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder.

At the heart of this program is a work by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff, a fully notated depiction of a woman’s sexual climax titled Sonata Erotica. Certainly not intended for the concert hall at the time of its composition in 1919 (Schulhoff writes, “For Men Only” on the title page), Sonata Erotica would have been a voyeuristic diversion in the nightclub or cabaret, and an example of the musical revolution of art “as the commonality of man” that the composer had embraced. 

Almost a century later, knowing what we do of Schulhoff’s death in a Nazi concentration camp, it is difficult to experience this work without feeling the magnitude of individual loss—millions upon millions of unrealized loves and intimacies that are our common, human birthright.