CHAPTER HAA
Kurt Schwitters wanted to preserve his ever-evolving Ur Sonata for posterity, but it wasn’t clear how to accomplish this. Ernst Schwitters writes:
Kurt Schwitters had realized all along, that a phonetic way of noting down the Sonata was essential, if it should not die with him… With each successive publication he improved on the form of notation, and finally, in 1932, the Sonate in Urlauten was published as his last number of the MERZ magazine, no. 24. But although this is undoubtedly the most phonetic way of notation to date, it is virtually impossible to recite it correctly, simply by reading it. A prime necessity is, that one has heard Kurt Schwitters recite it as often as possible.
Audio documentation was the obvious solution. In 1924, Kurt Schwitters edited together a three-minute recording, featuring selections from a dozen phonetic themes. Biographer Gwendolen Webster suggests,
Recipients of the Merz magazine…must…have been taken aback to find that Merz 13 was a gramophone record with Kurt reciting…from the Ursonate.
Creating the record had been a challenge. Art historian Kevin Concannon explains,
Kurt Schwitters was among the first to approach sound recording as a plastic medium. Using sound film, Schwitters edited and collaged his nonsense poems after he recorded them and before he pressed them into records.
Preserving the relatively short sampler of themes had been a big project. To capture the entire piece, Schwitters would need professional help. But the second time he was able to record Ur Sonata—in 1932, at the studio of Southern German Broadcasting Company—time permitted, once again, only a thematic selection, featuring primarily the “Lanke trr gll” Scherzo.
As the years passed, uprooted by flight from Nazis, Schwitters continued to seek an Ur Sonata recording opportunity. Exiled, in 1947, weakened by heart disease and a stroke, Kurt finally got his chance. Outrageously, because of middle-brow BBC taste, the recording was not to be. Gallery owner E.L.T. Mesens explains that his place,
London Gallery organized two MERZ Poetry Recitals. Their reception by the public was characteristic of the post-war mind. If I say that there was a total lack of interest, I am not exaggerating! At the first reading, Wednesday, 5th March, 1947, the attendance was of sixteen people including two journalists.
Stefan Themerson was also there:
Two gentlemen from the BBC were invited and came. The idea was that they would record the Ur Sonata. Just record it. Schwitters read his Ur Sonata, but the gentlemen left in the middle.
Kurt Schwitters referred to Ur Sonata as the second of his two masterpieces. His principal lifework had been his Hannover “Cathedral of Erotic Misery”—later called Merzbau—an elaborate complex of constructions developed continually over fifteen years, occupying first his art studio and subsequently more and more of his house’s interior. During World War II, while Kurt lived as a refugee in London, his hometown of Hannover was playing a major industrial and logistical role in support of the German war effort. On the night of October 8th, 1943, five-hundred-and-four Royal Air Force bombers attacked military targets and residential neighborhoods in Hannover. Schwitters’ house was hit, his Merzbau ruined—surviving now only in photos and the written recollections of its visitors.
When Schwitters died in 1948, the unique way he declaimed Ur Sonata had not been documented. Just as the Hannover Merzbau was lost, so Schwitters’ masterful Ur Sonata performance also was lost.
