Miklós Rózsa (Hungarian: [ˈmikloːʃ ˈroːʒɒ]; April 18, 1907 – July 27, 1995) was a Hungarian-American composer who studied in Germany from 1925 to 1931. He worked in France from 1931 to 1935, the United Kingdom from 1935 to 1940, and the United States from 1940 until his death in 1995. He also spent time in Italy starting in 1953. He is best known for creating nearly 100 film scores, but he always focused on serious concert music, which he called his "double life."
Rózsa gained early recognition in Europe for his orchestral piece Theme, Variations, and Finale (Op. 13) from 1933. He became well-known in the film industry for scores such as The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). The production of The Thief of Bagdad moved to Hollywood from wartime Britain, and Rózsa stayed in the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946.
During his time in Hollywood, Rózsa received 17 Academy Award nominations, including three Oscars for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959). His concert music was performed by notable artists such as Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, and János Starker.
Early life
Miklós Rózsa was born in Budapest. His mother, Regina (née Berkovits), was a pianist who had studied with students of Franz Liszt. His father, Gyula, was a wealthy industrialist and landowner who loved Hungarian folk music. Both parents were Jewish. Gyula’s father, Moritz Rosenberg, changed the family name to Rózsa in 1887. Gyula inherited a shoe factory in Budapest from his father, which brought him to the capital around 1900. Like his father, Gyula had socialist beliefs, which he shared in a pamphlet titled To Whom Does the Hungarian Soil Belong? Miklós grew up in a home that valued education and music. His only sibling, Edith, was born seven years after him.
Rózsa’s maternal uncle, Lajos Berkovits, a violinist with the Budapest Opera, gave him his first instrument at age five. Later, he played the viola and piano. By age eight, he was performing publicly and composing music. He also collected folk songs from the Palóc Hungarians in the area where his family owned a country estate north of Budapest. He admired the folk-inspired nationalism of composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály but wanted to develop his own style. Concerned that Kodály’s influence at the Franz Liszt Academy limited individual creativity, Rózsa chose to study music in Germany. In 1925, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study chemistry, as his father wished. However, he switched to the Leipzig Conservatory the next year to pursue composition. There, he studied with Hermann Grabner, who had been a student of Max Reger. He also studied choral music with Karl Straube at the Thomaskirche, where Johann Sebastian Bach once worked. These experiences deepened Rózsa’s respect for German musical traditions, which influenced his later work.
Rózsa’s first two published works, the String Trio, Op. 1, and the Piano Quintet, Op. 2, were released in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel. In 1929, he graduated with honors. During his time in Leipzig, he composed a single-movement Violin Concerto and a long Symphony, Op. 6. Neither was published, and Rózsa was discouraged after a Berlin trip when Wilhelm Furtwängler did not review the Symphony. He later allowed the Symphony (without its lost scherzo) to be recorded in 1993.
For a time, Rózsa stayed in Leipzig as Grabner’s assistant. At the suggestion of French composer Marcel Dupré, he moved to Paris in 1931. There, he composed chamber music and a Serenade for Small Orchestra, Op. 10 (later revised as Hungarian Serenade, Op. 25). The piece premiered in Budapest by Ernő Dohnányi, who advised Rózsa to offer a shorter work than the Symphony. Richard Strauss attended the performance, and his approval was more meaningful to Rózsa than the presence of royalty or Miklós Horthy, the prince regent. His later work, Theme, Variations, and Finale, Op. 13, was widely praised and performed by conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Georg Solti, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, and Leonard Bernstein.
Film scoring career
Rózsa first learned about film music in 1934 through his friend, the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger. After a concert where they both performed their own music, Honegger told Rózsa that he earned extra money by writing music for movies, including the film Les Misérables (1934). Rózsa watched the film and was impressed by how film music could tell stories. However, there were no film music jobs in Paris, so Rózsa relied on a wealthy supporter and wrote light music under the name Nic Tomay to support himself. He did not get his first film music job until he moved to London, where he composed the score for Knight Without Armour (1937), directed by his fellow Hungarian, Alexander Korda. Around the same time, he also wrote music for Thunder in the City (1937) for another Hungarian filmmaker, Ákos Tolnay, who had encouraged Rózsa to move to England. Although Thunder in the City was released first, Rózsa always considered the Korda film his official film debut. He later joined Korda’s London Films and composed music for The Four Feathers (1939). Korda and the studio’s music director, Muir Mathieson, asked Rózsa to join their project The Thief of Bagdad (1940) after the original composer’s style was no longer suitable. When World War II began, the film production moved to Hollywood, and Rózsa completed the score there in 1940.
The music earned Rózsa his first Academy Award nomination. While Korda stayed in Hollywood, Rózsa became the music director for his organization. In this role, he supervised the scoring of To Be or Not to Be (1942) and added his own music to the film. His other U.S. scores for Korda included Lydia (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), and The Jungle Book (1942). From The Jungle Book, Rózsa created The Jungle Book Suite for narrator and orchestra, which became popular when the film’s star, Sabu, narrated it. The recording was later made in New York by RCA and became the first major recording of Hollywood film music. It was also later recorded with Rózsa conducting the Frankenland State Orchestra of Nuremberg and Leo Genn as narrator.
In 1943, Rózsa worked with Paramount Studios and composed the score for Five Graves to Cairo, his first film with director Billy Wilder. That same year, he also scored Sahara, another film with a similar theme starring Humphrey Bogart. In 1944, his scores for Wilder’s Double Indemnity and The Woman of the Town both received Academy Award nominations.
In 1944, Rózsa was hired by producer David O. Selznick to compose the score for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound. The scoring process was difficult, with disagreements between the producer, director, and composer. Many changes were made by Audray Granville, Selznick’s assistant and unofficial music director. Despite these challenges, Spellbound became a hit after its release in late 1945. The film combined romantic melodies with intense, suspenseful music, and Rózsa’s use of the theremin, an unusual electronic instrument, helped create its unique sound. This work earned him an Academy Award nomination. Two other 1945 scores, The Lost Weekend and A Song to Remember, were also nominated, but the Oscar went to Spellbound. Although Selznick was not happy with the score, his creative radio promotion of the music helped both the film and Rózsa gain popularity. Later, Rózsa arranged his themes into The Spellbound Concerto, which became a lasting success in concerts and recordings. Composer Jerry Goldsmith later said Spellbound inspired him to pursue a career in film music.
Rózsa had a successful three-film partnership with independent producer Mark Hellinger. For The Killers (1946), he wrote a famous rhythmic theme that later became the "dum-da-dum-dum" signature of the radio and TV show Dragnet. A legal dispute later resulted in shared credit for Rózsa and Dragnet’s composer, Walter Schumann. This story is detailed in Jon Burlingame’s TV’s Biggest Hits (1996). Hellinger also worked with Rózsa on Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948). On the day before Hellinger died, he asked Rózsa to replace another composer’s music for The Naked City. Later, Rózsa created a six-movement suite from these three films as a tribute to Hellinger, titled The Mark Hellinger Suite, which was later recorded as Background to Violence.
Rózsa won his second Academy Award for A Double Life (1947), a film about a Shakespearean actor who becomes disturbed in his personal life. He later used the film’s title for his memoir, showing his desire to keep his personal music separate from his film work. That same year, Rózsa and Eugene Zador arranged music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for the film Song of Scheherazade, which imagined an episode from the composer’s early life. Zador, a fellow Hungarian and respected composer, helped arrange most of Rózsa’s Hollywood film scores. In 1947, Rózsa also composed the music for the psychological thriller The Red House.
In 1948, Rózsa signed a long-term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M), a first for him. Earlier work with Paramount and Universal had been on a film-by-film basis. The contract allowed Rózsa time to focus on his personal music, the right to refuse assignments, and the chance to teach a film music course at the University of Southern California. His M-G-M partnership, which lasted until 1962, led to new musical styles for the studio’s historical and biblical films. Quo Vadis (1951), one of Hollywood’s most expensive films at the time, marked the start of Rózsa’s focus on historical films. He researched ancient Greek music to create authentic-sounding scores. His research was later published and frequently reprinted. Other historical films from this era included Julius Caesar (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and King of Kings (1961), set in ancient times; Ivanhoe (1952) and Knights of the Round Table (1953), set in the Middle Ages; Young Bess (1953)
Death
Rózsa passed away on July 27, 1995, from a lung infection after having a stroke. He was 88 years old at the time. His wife, Margaret, died in 1999. She was 89 years old.
Works
Rózsa's first major success was an orchestral piece called Theme, Variations, and Finale, Op. 13. It was first performed in Duisburg, Germany, in 1934. Soon after, famous conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Bruno Walter, Hans Swarowsky, and others performed the piece. In the United States, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by Hans Lange, first played it on October 28–29, 1937. The piece became widely known in 1943 when it was broadcast by the New York Philharmonic during a concert where Leonard Bernstein made his famous conducting debut.
By 1952, Rózsa's work on film scores had become so successful that he negotiated a special agreement in his contract with MGM. This allowed him to take three months each year away from the film studio to focus on writing concert music.
Rózsa's Violin Concerto, Op. 24, was written between 1953 and 1954 for the violinist Jascha Heifetz. Heifetz worked with Rózsa to make small changes to the piece. Later, Rózsa used parts of this work for the film score of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), directed by Billy Wilder. Rózsa's Cello Concerto, Op. 32, was written much later, between 1967 and 1968, at the request of the cellist János Starker. Starker first performed the piece in Berlin in 1969.
Between his violin and cello concertos, Rózsa composed his Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 29, for violin, cello, and orchestra. The piece was commissioned by Heifetz and his frequent collaborator, Gregor Piatigorsky. However, they did not perform the finished work. They did record a shorter version of the slow movement, called Tema con Variazioni, Op. 29a.
Rózsa also received recognition for his choral works. He collaborated with conductor Maurice Skones and The Choir of the West at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Together, they created a 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. The recording was produced by John Steven Lasher and performed by Allen Giles for the Entr'acte Recording Society in 1978.
In popular culture
The seventh variation (after the theme) from his work Theme, Variations and Finale, Op. 13, was included in the music for four episodes—especially "The Clown Who Cried"—of the 1950s television show Adventures of Superman.
In the Tom Clancy novel Red Rabbit, a fictional character named "Jozsef Rozsa," described as a fictional cousin of Rózsa, is mentioned as a minor character. In the story, this character is known as a conductor of classical music.