The Hungarian composer György Ligeti rocketed to international fame as the composer of the mysterious "monolith music" in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, A Space Odyssey. Written fifteen to twenty years earlier than the release of that film (1948-1953), Ligeti's sonata for cello solo is in a less radical musical style, although it was already quite "modern." As a citizen of a nation under the dominance of the Soviet Union during those years, Ligeti could not get much more radical than the styles of his great Hungarian predecessors, Zoltán Kodaly and Béla Bartók.

The first of the sonata's two movements (totaling ten minutes or less), "Dialogo (Adagio rubato, cantabile)" achieves the effect of a dialogue by having the cello alternate passages in different playing styles and registers. In style, it is closer to the more conservative music of Kodály and was written in 1948. The second movement, "Capriccio (Presto con slancio)" was composed in 1953 and is close in style to that of the late Bartók, especially the music of the Sonata for violin solo and Music for Strings, Percussion, & Celeste.

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