Dialogo[edit]
Ligeti freely admitted that his pre-1956 compositions were heavily influenced by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.[8] Of the first movement of the Sonata, he described:
It's a dialogue. Because it's like two people, a man and a woman, conversing. I used the C string, the G string and the A string separately... I had been writing much more "modern" music in 1946 and 1947, and then in '48 I began to feel that I should try to be more "popular"... I attempted in this piece to write a beautiful melody, with a typical Hungarian profile, but not a folksong... or only half, like in Bartók or in Kodály—actually, closer to Kodály.[9]