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Miklós Rózsa
Franz Waxman
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Miklós Rózsa, 1907–1995
Miklós Rózsa was born in Budapest on 18 April
1907. He was 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
Béla 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 Zoltán Kodály, keeping his own notebook of collected
folk tunes.
He decided to go to Leipzig, supposedly to study chemistry,
but having enlisted the support of Hermann Grabner, Rózsa finally
enrolled as a full-time music student. A performance of his Piano Quintet
op. 2 attracted the attention of Karl Straube, the cantor of the Thomaskirche,
who was very impressed and furnished Rózsa with an introduction
to Breitkopf and Härtel. They immediately offered him a contract,
and the String Trio op. 1 and the Piano Quintet op. 2 became his first
published compositions.
In 1929, he received his diploma cum laude. For a time,
he remained in Leipzig as Grabner’s assistant. 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 Leonard Bernstein made his conducting
debut with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra 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 invited to compose Hungaria, a ballet in one act, for the Markova-Dolin
Company. Among those who heard it was the film director Jacques Feyder,
who arranged for Rózsa to write the score for his next picture,
Knight without Armour (with Marlene Dietrich and Robert Donat),
which he was directing for Rózsa’s fellow expatriate Hungarian
Sir Alexander Korda. The score Rózsa produced won considerable
acclaim, and following the success of Thunder in the City, his
next picture, he was invited to join the staff of Korda’s London
Films. The Four Feathers was Rózsa’s first big international
success. From 1935 to 1939, he frequently shuttled between Paris and London.
At the start of World War II, Korda found himself obliged
to transplant the entire production corps to Hollywood; Rózsa accompanied
them. He docked at Manhattan in April 1940 and made his way west to Hollywood,
and it became his home. For a time, Rózsa remained with Korda and
scored another big success with The Jungle Book. In 1943, he married
Margaret Finlason, formerly secretary to Gracie Fields. Their daughter
Juliet was born in 1945 and their son Nicholas in 1946, by which time
Rózsa was firmly established as one of the leading composers of
the film colony. Rózsa received the Academy Award in 1945 for his
score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound; he won it again in
1947 for A Double Life, and for a third time in 1959 for Ben
Hur. In 1945, he joined the faculty of the University of Southern
California as professor of film music, a post he retained until 1965.
In 1948, Rózsa joined the staff of MGM Pictures and remained with
them until 1962, scoring many of the major productions of the 1950s. His
skill at manipulating traditional forms is particularly evident in the
Concerto for Strings (1943, rev. 1957) and the Piano Sonata
(1948). Best known are his Violin Concerto (1953) written for Jascha
Heifetz, the Piano Concerto (1966), the Cello Concerto (1968)
composed for Janos Starker, and a Viola Concerto (1979) for Pinchas
Zukerman.
Seemingly forgotten by a pop-oriented Hollywood in the 1970s,
Rózsa experienced an extraordinary renaissance in later years.
His film scores were rediscovered and successfully recorded by Charles
Gerhardt, Elmer Bernstein, and Rózsa himself. Honorary doctorates
were conferred by the College of Wooster (Ohio) and the University of
Southern California in 1988. He received a César award for the
score for Providence (1977) by Alain Resnais.
Rózsa summed up his career with an elegant memoir,
A Double Life, published in 1982. That same year, a debilitating
stroke began the final chapter, effectively ending his film career. The
composer fought back with the toughness and tenacity that belied his courtly
manner. Throughout the 1980s, there emerged a series of solo compositions
for flute, clarinet, guitar, oboe, violin, ondes martenot, and viola.
Failing eyesight finally stilled his pen in 1988. His final years were
severely restricted in their activity. Rózsa died on 27 July 1995.
(This biography was taken, with modifications, from the collection register
of the Miklós Rósza Papers [collection no. 329] at the University
of Southern California Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.)
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