| Miklós Rózsa | |
|---|---|
| Born | Miklós Rózsa April 18, 1907 Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) |
| Died | July 27, 1995 (aged 88) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | composer |
| Years active | 1918–1989 |
| Spouse(s) | Margaret Finlason (1943-1995) (his death) |
Miklós Rózsa (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmikloːʃ ˈroːʒɒ]) or Miklos Rozsa (April 18, 1907 – July 27, 1995) was a Hungarian-born award winning composer and conductor, best known for his numerous film scores.
Rózsa was one of the most respected and popular film score composers in Hollywood. In a career that spanned over fifty years, he composed music for nearly 100 films including Spellbound (1945), Quo Vadis (1951), Ben-Hur (1959), and King of Kings (1961).
Rózsa was a three time Oscar winner, and was nominated a total of 16 times, making him one of the most nominated composers in Oscar history. He also received three Golden Globe nominations and one Grammy Award nomination, but never won either award.
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Miklós Rózsa was born in Budapest and was introduced to classical and folk music by his mother, a classical pianist who had studied with pupils of Franz Liszt, and his father, a well-to-do industrialist and landowner who loved Hungarian folk music. He began to study the violin at age 5 and later the viola and piano. By age 8 he was performing in public and composing. He also collected folksongs from the area where his family had a country estate north of Budapest in an area inhabited by the Palóc, an ethnic minority in the country.
Rózsa did not much like life in Budapest and so went to Leipzig, ostensibly to study chemistry, but with music in mind. He ended up, indeed, studying music full-time at the Leipzig Conservatory with Hermann Grabner, a former student of Max Reger.
Rózsa's first two published works, String Trio, Op. 1, and the Piano Quintet, Op. 2, were published in Leipzig and in 1929 he received his diplomas cum laude. For a time he stayed on in Leipzig as Grabner's assistant but at the suggestion of the French organist and composer Marcel Dupré, moved to Paris in 1932.
In Paris, Rózsa composed classical music, including his Hungarian Serenade for small orchestra, Op. 10 (later revised and renumbered as Op. 25) and the Theme, Variations, and Finale, Op. 13, which was especially well received and was performed by conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Georg Solti, Eugene Ormandy, and Leonard Bernstein.
Rózsa was introduced to film music in 1934 by his friend, the composer Arthur Honegger. They had given a concert together of their compositions when Honegger mentioned he had written the score for the movie of the Les Misérables. Rózsa went to see it and was greatly impressed.
However, it was in London that Rózsa broke into the new medium when he was invited to write the score for the picture Knight Without Armour, directed by his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda. After his next score (for Thunder in the City), he joined the staff of Korda's London Films.
In 1939 Rózsa went with Korda to Hollywood to complete The Thief of Bagdad. Rózsa remained in California the rest of his life and scored over 100 films. He is probably best known for his work on MGM's 1959 epic Ben-Hur, for which he won his third Academy Award. Following his work on Ben-Hur he composed the score for another of MGM's religious epics, King of Kings (1961), which was also very popular. Rózsa also won Oscars for his scores to Spellbound (1945) and A Double Life (1947).
Calling it "one of the great musical scores of the Seventies", film critic Duncan Shepherd praised Rózsa's scoring of 1977's Providence from Alain Resnais, as "a darkly romantic work that harks back to the mood and manner of his film noir scores of the Forties."[1]
In 1995 a two-hour Public Radio documentary Ben Hur: The Epic Film Scores of Miklos Rozsa was produced by film historian Bruce Crawford. Rózsa also wrote an autobiography, Double Life.
Rózsa's best known concert work is the orchestral Theme, Variations and Finale, Op. 13, which was on the program when Leonard Bernstein made his conducting debut.
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. The work evokes the passion of native Hungarian music. Rózsa later adapted portions of this work for the score of Billy Wilder's 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the plot of which, Wilder has said, was inspired by Rózsa's concerto.
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 professional 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 J S R Lasher and professionally recorded by Allen Giles for the Entr'acte Recording Society in 1978.
The following works for orchestra, solo instruments with orchestra, and concert versions of film scores are as listed by the Miklós Rózsa Society website:
& Härtel, London, Wiesbaden (1975)
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