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Árpád SOLTI: Nudes Árpád SOLTI’s symphonic poem Nudes links pictures into a musical triptych. The composer points to three paintings as his source of inspiration, all three identical in subject, but strikingly diff erent in style. The strengths of this composition are not, however, to be found in its development of the relation between image and music. More decisive is the way the movements are linked: they follow without a break, and the musical characters fl ow smoothly into one another. The composition recreates the symphonic style of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with great artifi ce. Of the broad contours of the composition, the listener goes away with an impression of a uniform tone, while each movement and parts thereof have strikingly individual profi les. Szabolcs Molnár, music critic (Translated by Richard Robinson) The problem of programme music divides composers and critics to this day. Can music depict anything other than itself – is it in fact capable of representing anything? As the father of the genre of the symphonic poem, Liszt held a steadfast belief in music’s power of depiction. The representation of an image in music is interesting in several respects. We can pluck the image from its apparently static state, or supply additional shades of colour to it. The mystic relationship between Liszt and the women who appeared around him led me to choose to depict nude paintings in music, in the formal framework of the symphonic poem. Liszt’s relationship to eroticism has been treated in Jesús Franco contemporary Spanish fi lm director’s Erotic Symphony. This art-house fi lm is unusual in that it chose Liszt’s music to represent eroticism. I have drawn on this experience, among others, for my fi rst orchestral work, in which I represent the meaning behind the paintings that inspired the composition. Nudes depicts three paintings – in music. Gustave Courbet’s picture L’Origine du monde (1866) is the most expressive; here I have dismantled and shred the motivic fragments of Bagatelle sans tonalité, and the resulting material is poured into a free form, rich in extremities. Salvador Dali’s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944) portrays his own wife, using Sigmund Freud’s research into dreams as a theoretical background. Its musical material is formed using the notes of the chords in Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 4. In the second movement of that piece can be found one of the motives of Liszt’s B minor sonata, which presumably appeared from Hindemith’s subconscious, rather than being a deliberate quotation. For Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting Bagneuse endormie (1897) I sought for Impressionist tones, and found them in the Jeux d’eau ŕ la Villa d’Este, and I created the movement’s harmonies and melodic structure using the tonal organization of that piece. Árpád Solti (Translated by Richard Robinson)