Miklós Rózsa

Miklós Rózsa
(b Budapest, 18 April 1907; d Los Angeles, 27 July 1995). American composer of Hungarian birth.

Raised in Budapest and on his father’s rural estate in nearby Tomasi, he was exposed to Hungarian peasant music and folk traditions from an early age. He studied the piano with his mother, a classmate of Bartók at the Budapest Academy, and the violin and viola with his uncle, Lajos Berkovits, a musician with the Royal Hungarian Opera. By the age of seven, Rózsa was composing his own works. Later, as a student at the Realgymnasium, he championed the work of Bartók and Kodály, keeping his own notebook of collected folktunes.

In 1926, Rózsa left Budapest to enroll at the Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied composition with Grabner and musicology with Kroyer. By 1929 his chamber works, published by Breitkopf & Härtel, were being promoted and performed throughout Europe. In 1931 he moved to Paris where he completed his Theme, Variations and Finale (1933, rev. 1943 and 1966), a work that soon gained international recognition. (It was on the programme the night Bernstein made his conducting début with the New York PO in 1943.) In recognition of his musical achievements, Rózsa was awarded the Franz Joseph Prize from the municipality of Budapest in 1937 and 1938.

Rózsa was introduced to the genre of film music through his friend Arthur Honegger. From 1935 to 1939 he frequently shuttled between Paris and London, where he composed for London Films under the Hungarian-born producer Alexander Korda. In 1940 he accompanied Korda to Hollywood to complete the score of The Thief of Baghdad, and was soon in great demand as a freelance film composer and conductor. As a staff member at MGM (1948–62), he became one of the most highly regarded composers in the industry, writing music for over 100 films. From 1945 to 1965 he also taught film music at the University of Southern California.

Most of Rózsa’s film scores employ leitmotifs that accompany and represent specific characters or events on the screen. His angular melodies and contrapuntal textures helped to define the 1940s genre of film noir. Scores for epic and period films in the 1950s distinguished themselves by the accuracy of their well-researched historical detail. Rózsa won Academy Awards for the soundtracks of Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1948) and Ben-Hur (1959), and a César award for the score for Providence (1977).

The essence of Rózsa’s musical style springs from his early experiences with Magyar peasants; his harmonic and melodic constructions characteristically derive from the pentatonic and modal qualities of Hungarian folk music. His works are also infused with the vitality of Hungarian dance rhythms and the sentimental lyricism of the gypsy tradition. Rózsa does not quote folk melodies in his compositions, however. Instead, in works such as North Hungarian Peasant Songs and Dances (1929), Three Hungarian Sketches (1958) and Notturno ungherese (1964) he invents his own folk-like material. His skill at manipulating traditional forms is particularly evident in the Concerto for Strings (1943, rev. 1957) and the Piano Sonata (1948). Also noteworthy are his virtuosic concertos for the violin (1953), piano (1966), cello (1968) and viola (1979).