Kurt Schwitters’ most significant works, according to the artist himself, were his Merzbau installation – a sculpture in his parents’ home in Hanover that spanned several rooms – and the Ursonate, a sound poem comprising three musical movements. While he was forced to abandon his Merzbau construction forever upon his flight from Germany in 1937, Ursonate, a poem he recited countless times from the 1920s onwards, remained part of his repertoire in exile.

This Dadaistic spectacle of a poem, which breaks the language barriers associated with conventional poetry, was also the subject of many readings during Schwitters’ time in exile. His first grateful audience was made up of fellow detainees in his Isle of Man internment camp. One amused listener reported, after one reading of the poem, that internees began greeting each other with the expression “ooka ooka”, a sound taken from Ursonate.

No recording of this 35-minute symphony of sounds ever captured the piece in its entirety. Schwitters made efforts to create a full sound recording but was unsuccessful. All that remains from his readings is a series of photos taken by his son Ernst in 1944. The images show Schwitters delivering a rendition of Ursonate at the opening of a solo exhibition in London’s Modern Art Gallery. The British author Herbert Read introduced the reading by explaining to the audience the significance of Schwitters’ work in terms of lyric poetry and made comparisons with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It seems Schwitters’ piece did not resonate with the London audience. Writing to an acquaintance after the performance, Schwitters stated that “English word play is not German word play. The translation would have had to be very free. And the audience would have had to be very understanding”. (Kurt Schwitters, in a letter to Edith Tschibold, 10 December 1944).