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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)