Miklós Rózsa

Miklós Rózsa (; April 18, 1907 – July 27, 1995) was a Hungarian-American composer trained in Germany (1925–1931) and active in France (1931–1935), the United Kingdom (1935–1940), and the United States (1940–1995), with extensive sojourns in Italy from 1953 onward. Best known for his nearly one hundred film scores, he nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout what he called his "double life".

Rózsa achieved early success in Europe with his orchestral Theme, Variations, and Finale (Op. 13) of 1933, and became prominent in the film industry from such early scores as The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). The latter project brought him to Hollywood when production was transferred from wartime Britain, and Rózsa remained in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1946.

During his Hollywood career, he received 17 Academy Award nominations including three Oscars for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959), while his concert works were championed by such major artists as Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, and János Starker.

Early life

Miklós Rózsa was born in Budapest and was introduced to classical and folk music by his mother, Regina (née Berkovits), a pianist who had studied with pupils of Franz Liszt, and his father, Gyula, a well-to-do industrialist and landowner who loved Hungarian folk music. Both parents were of Jewish origin. Gyula's father, Moritz Rosenberg, had changed the family name to Rózsa in 1887. Gyula Rózsa had inherited from his father a Budapest shoe factory, which brought him to the capital around 1900. Like his father, and despite his landowning status, Gyula had socialist leanings, which he expressed in a pamphlet entitled To Whom Does the Hungarian Soil Belong? Young Miklós grew up in a home of enlightened values and musical culture. His only sibling, Edith, was born seven years later.

Rózsa's maternal uncle Lajos Berkovits, violinist with the Budapest Opera, presented young Miklós with his first instrument at the age of five. He later took up the viola and piano. By the age of eight he was performing in public and composing. During the Leipzig years he essayed a single-movement Violin Concerto and a lengthy Symphony, Op. 6. Neither work was published, and Rózsa was discouraged on a trip to Berlin when Wilhelm Furtwängler did not find time to consider the Symphony. Rozsa suppressed both works, but eventually allowed the Symphony (minus its lost scherzo) to be recorded in 1993.

For a time he remained in Leipzig as Grabner's assistant, but at the suggestion of the French organist and composer Marcel Dupré, he moved to Paris in 1931. There he composed chamber music and a Serenade for small orchestra, Op. 10 (later greatly revised as Hungarian Serenade, Op. 25). It was premiered in Budapest by Ernő Dohnányi, who had advised Rózsa to offer a shorter work than the Symphony. Richard Strauss was in the audience, and his approval meant more to the young composer than the presence of Habsburg royalty and the prince regent, Miklós Horthy. The subsequent Theme, Variations, and Finale, Op. 13, was especially well received and was performed by conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Georg Solti, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein.

Film scoring career

Rózsa was introduced to film music in 1934 by his friend, the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger. Following a concert which featured their respective compositions, Honegger mentioned that he supplemented his income as a composer of film scores, including the film Les Misérables (1934). Rózsa went to see it and was greatly impressed by the opportunities the film medium offered. However, no film scoring opportunities presented themselves in Paris, and Rózsa had to support himself by reliance on a wealthy patron and by composing light music under the pseudonym Nic Tomay. It was not until Rózsa moved to London that he was hired to compose his first film score for Knight Without Armour (1937), produced by his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda. For this massive production, Hollywood's most expensive film to that date, Rózsa went back to ancient Greek sources in an effort to simulate the music of antiquity. His account of this research was published in Film Music Notes 11:2 (1951) and has been reprinted frequently since. Other historical pictures from this era were set in Antiquity: Julius Caesar (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) and King of Kings (1961); in the Middle Ages: Ivanhoe (1952) and Knights of the Round Table (1953); in the Renaissance: Young Bess (1953) and Diane (1956); and in the nineteenth century: Madame Bovary (1949) and Lust for Life (1956).

Ben-Hur, widely considered Rózsa's cinemusical masterpiece, is one of the longest film scores ever composed. Its intricate Wagnerian web of leitmotifs has received extensive study. Roger Hickman describes it as "the last universally acknowledged score created in the classical Hollywood tradition prior to Star Wars (1977)... and one of the most influential scores on the Star Wars generation." The film was Hollywood's greatest success since Gone with the Wind, and Rózsa's Academy Award was one of its record total of eleven. The "Parade of the Charioteers" became popular with bands across the country.

In 1968, he was asked to score The Green Berets, after Elmer Bernstein turned it down due to his political beliefs. Rózsa initially declined the offer, saying, "I don't do westerns." However, he agreed to compose the score after being informed, "It's not a Western, it's an 'Eastern'." He produced a strong and varied score, which included a nightclub vocal by a Vietnamese singer, Bạch Yến. However, one cue which incorporated stanzas of "Onward, Christian Soldiers", was deleted from the film's final edit.

He returned to California at the behest of his son, and remained sequestered at his home for the remainder of his life.

Death

Rózsa died on July 27, 1995 of pneumonia following a stroke, at the age of 88. His wife, Margaret, died in 1999, aged 89.

Works

Rózsa's first major success was the orchestral Theme, Variations, and Finale, Op. 13, introduced in Duisburg, Germany, in 1934 and soon taken up by Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Bruno Walter, Hans Swarowsky, and other leading conductors. It was first played in the United States by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Hans Lange on October 28–29, 1937, and achieved wide exposure through a 1943 New York Philharmonic concert broadcast when Leonard Bernstein made his famous conducting debut.

By 1952, his film score work was proving so successful that he was able to negotiate a clause in his contract with MGM that gave him three months each year away from the film studio so that he could focus on concert music.

Rózsa's Violin Concerto, Op. 24, was composed in 1953–54 for the violinist Jascha Heifetz, who collaborated with the composer in fine-tuning it. Rózsa later adapted portions of this work for the score of Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). Rózsa's Cello Concerto, Op. 32 was written much later (1967–68) at the request of the cellist János Starker, who premiered the work in Berlin in 1969.

Between his violin and cello concertos, Rózsa composed his Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 29, for violin, cello, and orchestra. The commissioning artists, Heifetz and his frequent collaborator Gregor Piatigorsky, never performed the finished work, although they did record a reduced version of the slow movement, called Tema con Variazoni, Op. 29a.

Rózsa also received recognition for his choral works. His collaboration with conductor Maurice Skones and The Choir of the West at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, resulted in a commercial recording of his sacred choral works—To Everything There is a Season, Op. 20; The Vanities of Life, Op. 30; and The Twenty-Third Psalm, Op. 34—produced by John Steven Lasher and recorded by Allen Giles for the Entr'acte Recording Society in 1978.

In popular culture

The seventh variation (after the theme) of his Theme, Variations and Finale, Op. 13, was used as part of the soundtrack in four episodes—most notably "The Clown Who Cried"—of 1950s television series Adventures of Superman.

In the Tom Clancy novel Red Rabbit, a fictional cousin of Rózsa's, "Jozsef Rozsa", appears as a minor character who is famous in-universe as a conductor of classical music.

Bibliography

Miklós Rózsa: "Quo Vadis?" Film Music Notes, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1951)
Miklós Rózsa: Double Life: The Autobiography of Miklós Rózsa, Composer in the Golden Years of Hollywood, Seven Hills Books (1989) –
Miklós Rózsa: Double Life: The Autobiography of Miklós Rózsa, Composer in the Golden Years of Hollywood, The Baton Press (1984) – (Softcover edition)
Miklós Rózsa: Életem történeteiből (Discussions with János Sebestyén, edited by György Lehotay-Horváth). Zeneműkiadó, Budapest (1980) –

References

External links

Miklós Rózsa Society
1987 Miklós Rózsa interview
The Life of Miklós Rózsa essay
Centennial Tribute to Miklos Rózsa
Miklós Rózsa at SoundtrackCollector.com
Miklós Rózsa Papers at Syracuse University
David Raksin Remembers His Colleagues: Miklós Rózsa