Biography
Born in Hungary, this composer earned his greatest renown for scores written for Hollywood and British films, yet he also produced a substantial catalog of chamber works, concertos, and orchestral pieces meant for the concert stage. Rózsa’s idiom remained rooted in post-romanticism and drew stylistic nourishment from the folk traditions of his native land, along with modest influences from the two towering figures of twentieth-century Hungarian music, Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. Tonal and lyrical—sometimes to the point of poignancy—his most approachable pages evoke the spirit of Dvorak, Janacek, and Respighi, although their sources lie in Hungarian rather than Czech or Italian soil. His music could conjure the vanished atmosphere of pre-World War I Budapest, raise the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of Hungarian folk music to symphonic scale, or, on screen, convey the full spectrum of human emotion, whether the icy detachment of murder in The Killers or the spiritual message of Jesus in Ben-Hur.
The son of a prosperous industrialist and landowner in Budapest, Miklos Rózsa passed his childhood summers on the family’s rural estate, where he first came into contact with local villagers and absorbed their music. He took up the violin at five and later studied viola and piano, making his public debut at seven. While still in secondary school he became an active participant in the Franz Liszt Society, yet school officials labeled him a troublemaker after two speeches in which he defended the music of Bartok and Kodaly, then viewed as radical modernists.
In 1925 he entered the University of Leipzig as a chemistry student at his father’s insistence, only to change his major to music after the first year. His instructors included Herman Grabner and Karl Straube, cantor of the Thomaskirche. During his undergraduate period Rózsa completed his first formal composition, the Trio-Serenade for Strings, followed by the Piano Quintet in F Minor, the Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, and Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song. Straube was so impressed by the Piano Quintet that he brought it to Breitkopf & Hartel, which accepted both that work and the Trio-Serenade for publication. After graduating in 1929 he served briefly as Grabner’s assistant in Leipzig before relocating to Paris in 1931. His Serenade was performed in Budapest under Ernest von Dohnanyi; Richard Strauss heard the piece and urged the young composer to persist. Rózsa’s decisive breakthrough arrived in 1934 with the premiere of Theme, Variations and Finale, soon taken up by conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Bohm, and Carl Schuricht, and later by Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, and Leonard Bernstein.
Rózsa first encountered film scoring in the mid-1930s upon learning that his friend Arthur Honegger had composed for the cinema. Intrigued, he began to examine how music functioned within motion pictures. In 1937 he received the commission for Knight Without Armour, a romantic espionage thriller starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat that achieved worldwide success. Shortly afterward he joined the music staff of London Films, the company founded by fellow Hungarian expatriate Alexander Korda, and over the next three years scored such notable productions as The Four Feathers and The Thief of Baghdad. When Korda transferred the latter project from London to Hollywood in 1940, Rózsa was among the personnel who accompanied the move.
Once established in the world’s film capital, Rózsa worked for several years as a freelance composer, chiefly for Paramount Pictures on Billy Wilder films (Five Graves to Cairo, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend), for producer David O. Selznick on Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and on occasional Korda productions (That Hamilton Woman, The Jungle Book). After receiving Academy Awards for Spellbound (1945) and A Double Life (1948), he joined the music department of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he remained for fifteen years and scored such landmark pictures as Ben-Hur, earning his third Oscar. Throughout this period he continued to compose concert works, including Lullaby and Madrigal for Spring, the solo piano suite Kaleidoscope, the motet To Everything There Is a Season, and his First String Quartet. His studio contract granted him summers free for composition and complete independence regarding his concert activities.
In 1953 the violinist Jascha Heifetz, after examining sketches for a projected violin concerto, commissioned the work; it was premiered in 1956 and recorded the same year for RCA. The Violin Concerto remained popular, prompting a joint 1961 commission from Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky for the Sinfonia Concertante. During the 1960s Rózsa produced large-scale orchestral scores such as Notturno Ungherese, a Piano Concerto written for Leonard Pennario, and a Cello Concerto for Janos Starker. In the 1970s he turned increasingly to solo pieces, among them Valse Crepusculaire for piano, while also completing a Viola Concerto for Pinchas Zuckerman, premiered in 1984.
Throughout his career Rózsa maintained a balance between film and concert composition. At times the two spheres intersected: he scored Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and appeared in the film conducting his own Violin Concerto. He remained productive into the 1980s, receiving another Oscar nomination for Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979) and issuing new concert works through the end of the decade.
Even after age and a debilitating stroke curtailed his concert-hall activities, Rózsa sustained a lively interest in his entire output during the 1990s. He participated in new recordings of his orchestral music conducted by James Sedares for Koch International and restored such pieces as the Symphony in Three Movements, withdrawn from publication in 1930. Rózsa died in Los Angeles on July 27, 1995.
The son of a prosperous industrialist and landowner in Budapest, Miklos Rózsa passed his childhood summers on the family’s rural estate, where he first came into contact with local villagers and absorbed their music. He took up the violin at five and later studied viola and piano, making his public debut at seven. While still in secondary school he became an active participant in the Franz Liszt Society, yet school officials labeled him a troublemaker after two speeches in which he defended the music of Bartok and Kodaly, then viewed as radical modernists.
In 1925 he entered the University of Leipzig as a chemistry student at his father’s insistence, only to change his major to music after the first year. His instructors included Herman Grabner and Karl Straube, cantor of the Thomaskirche. During his undergraduate period Rózsa completed his first formal composition, the Trio-Serenade for Strings, followed by the Piano Quintet in F Minor, the Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, and Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song. Straube was so impressed by the Piano Quintet that he brought it to Breitkopf & Hartel, which accepted both that work and the Trio-Serenade for publication. After graduating in 1929 he served briefly as Grabner’s assistant in Leipzig before relocating to Paris in 1931. His Serenade was performed in Budapest under Ernest von Dohnanyi; Richard Strauss heard the piece and urged the young composer to persist. Rózsa’s decisive breakthrough arrived in 1934 with the premiere of Theme, Variations and Finale, soon taken up by conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Bohm, and Carl Schuricht, and later by Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, and Leonard Bernstein.
Rózsa first encountered film scoring in the mid-1930s upon learning that his friend Arthur Honegger had composed for the cinema. Intrigued, he began to examine how music functioned within motion pictures. In 1937 he received the commission for Knight Without Armour, a romantic espionage thriller starring Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat that achieved worldwide success. Shortly afterward he joined the music staff of London Films, the company founded by fellow Hungarian expatriate Alexander Korda, and over the next three years scored such notable productions as The Four Feathers and The Thief of Baghdad. When Korda transferred the latter project from London to Hollywood in 1940, Rózsa was among the personnel who accompanied the move.
Once established in the world’s film capital, Rózsa worked for several years as a freelance composer, chiefly for Paramount Pictures on Billy Wilder films (Five Graves to Cairo, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend), for producer David O. Selznick on Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and on occasional Korda productions (That Hamilton Woman, The Jungle Book). After receiving Academy Awards for Spellbound (1945) and A Double Life (1948), he joined the music department of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he remained for fifteen years and scored such landmark pictures as Ben-Hur, earning his third Oscar. Throughout this period he continued to compose concert works, including Lullaby and Madrigal for Spring, the solo piano suite Kaleidoscope, the motet To Everything There Is a Season, and his First String Quartet. His studio contract granted him summers free for composition and complete independence regarding his concert activities.
In 1953 the violinist Jascha Heifetz, after examining sketches for a projected violin concerto, commissioned the work; it was premiered in 1956 and recorded the same year for RCA. The Violin Concerto remained popular, prompting a joint 1961 commission from Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky for the Sinfonia Concertante. During the 1960s Rózsa produced large-scale orchestral scores such as Notturno Ungherese, a Piano Concerto written for Leonard Pennario, and a Cello Concerto for Janos Starker. In the 1970s he turned increasingly to solo pieces, among them Valse Crepusculaire for piano, while also completing a Viola Concerto for Pinchas Zuckerman, premiered in 1984.
Throughout his career Rózsa maintained a balance between film and concert composition. At times the two spheres intersected: he scored Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and appeared in the film conducting his own Violin Concerto. He remained productive into the 1980s, receiving another Oscar nomination for Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979) and issuing new concert works through the end of the decade.
Even after age and a debilitating stroke curtailed his concert-hall activities, Rózsa sustained a lively interest in his entire output during the 1990s. He participated in new recordings of his orchestral music conducted by James Sedares for Koch International and restored such pieces as the Symphony in Three Movements, withdrawn from publication in 1930. Rózsa died in Los Angeles on July 27, 1995.
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