Erwin Schulhoff - Sonata Erotica (1919)

When one thinks of Dadaism, the genres that often come to mind may include visual collages, assemblages, and photomontages. Dadaism also extended into the world of music, where musicians, with the same mindset as the visual artists, embraced the world of the surreal to express themselves in ways previously unknown. The movement came to be as a reaction to World War I. Those who considered themselves as part of the artistic movement cast away the logic, reason, and aestheticism they associated with the workings of capitalism, and instead took upon the irrational, the chaotic, and the impossible. Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff, as a communist, was certainly no stranger to these values. His “Sonata Er​otic​a” teases the contemporary norms of propriety, just as much as one of his other Dadaist works, the “Symphonia Germanica”, lampoons the postprimomundibellum feelings of militant nationalism. The Sonata, composed in 1919 around the time of or shortly after the Treaty of Versailles, consis