Abstract
In Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, music and poetry are so interwoven that they cannot be teased apart. Poised at the interface of literature, music, typography, film and performance as no other work of its time, the Ursonate remains relevant to our age, and its incongruous complexity and scurrilous humour still confound unsuspecting audiences. Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is nowadays best known for his collages, but the range of his activities during the Weimar Republic was astonishing. When his life became unbearable in Nazi Germany, he took refuge in Norway, then fled to England, where his Ursonate found an appreciative audience in the exile community. The Ursonate is typical of Schwitters’ oeuvre in that it was conceived round an objet trouvé, in this case a literary one, which eventually developed into a thirty-five-minute multimedia performance piece. Using contemporary sources, this chapter will explore the Ursonate in the context of Schwitters’ intermedial artistic practices and examine its reputation as a suspect work from its inception to the present.
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