The Double Life of Miklós Rózsa

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF MIKLÓS RÓZSA

(1907 – 1995)

by Dr. James H. Krukones

When Miklós Rózsa borrowed the title of one of his Oscar-winning film scores for his autobiography Double Life, he was referring above all to the two-sided creative existence that spanned the majority of his eighty-eight years – as a remarkably successful creator of music for the movies and as a respected composer of serious, and regularly performed, works for the concert hall. But Rózsa had a double life in other respects as well. This native son of Hungary came to the United States in 1940, expecting to stay no more than a month; instead, the move proved permanent, and Rózsa became an American citizen in 1945. Nevertheless, his homeland was never far from his thoughts or his muse, and he paid a return visit in 1974 to popular acclaim. Rózsa’s attachment to Hungary, in particular, the Hungarian countryside and its peasant inhabitants, coexisted with a cosmopolitan taste for the finest in urban culture, especially that of Rome, his favorite city. On still another level, the privacy he craved for creative endeavor never turned him into a recluse; for twenty years Rózsa taught a course in film scoring at the University of Southern California (the first course of its kind in the U.S.), seeking to give back, and pass along, his knowledge and experience.

The life work of Miklós Rózsa – this musical populist-cum-highbrow, Hungarian-American, urbane rustic, public yet private individual – is so varied and substantial that in a brief presentation such as this it is possible only to offer a biographical sketch and then to highlight some characteristics of his music. Rózsa was born on 18 April 1907 in Budapest. His father Gyula was a landowning industrialist with no interest in serious music. His mother Regina, on the other hand, had at one time studied the piano at the Budapest Academy. While her hope of a concert career did not materialize, she did hand down a love of music to her son, who began violin lessons at the age 5. The desire to compose developed early, and by his teens Rózsa was studying composition on his own from books. He preferred the music of Bartók and Kodály, whom the musical establishment of the day disdained. Unhappy in Budapest, Rózsa hoped to pursue musical study abroad but ran into opposition from his practical-minded father, who believed that writing music was no way to put food on the table. In 1925, therefore, Rózsa entered the University of Leipzig as a chemistry major. Within a year his passion for music had grown to the point where even his father had to relent; in 1926 Rózsa enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory and began studying composition with Hermann Gräbner, a student of Max Reger. After Gräbner wrote to Rózsa’s father and described Miklós’s artistic prospects in glowing terms, paternal opposition turned into support.

Following his graduation from the Conservatory, Rózsa decided that Leipzig was too conservative for his musical tastes, so he moved to Paris in 1931. There he continued to compose works for the concert hall, which began spreading his renown throughout Europe. Paris also saw the beginning of his film career, in a manner of speaking: to make extra money, Rózsa wrote the music for songs that were played during the intervals between showings in cinemas and composed about fifty fanfares that introduced the Pathé company’s newsreels. But it was only when composer Arthur Honegger suggested he take a cue from him an write film scores that Rózsa began to give the idea serious consideration. Believing that opportunities for film work were more plentiful across the Channel, Rózsa moved to London in 1935 – after ten English lessons at Berlitz.

The gamble paid off. London not only provided the chance to write a ballet score (Hungaria, based on native folk dances) and take conducting lessons; it also led, via director Jacques Feyder, to film producer Alexander Korda, who, after some finagling, signed Rózsa to a contract with his company London Film Productions Ltd. (It didn’t hurt that Korda and his brothers, like Rózsa, were transplanted Hungarian.) Rózsa created his first film score for Knight Without Armor, in 1937. He took to the new medium with such effectiveness that the director of a later Korda film – Thief of Baghdad – decided to abandon his original idea of engaging operetta composer Oscar Strauss. Thief of Baghdad would prove to be Rózsa’s first great film score and great success, but not before the Second World War and financial considerations caused Korda to decide that the production would have to be completed in America. Rózsa made the journey by ship, but is was the vastness of the American plains, not the Atlantic, that really impressed the young man.

Film Scoring dominated Rózsa’s life for the next several years. While sometimes running afoul of studio musical directors and their limited tastes, in general he enjoyed the support of intelligent producers and directors. His reputation as a composer on innovativeness and psychological depth grew. In 1948 an important turning point occurred when he accepted a long-term contract from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Rolls-Royce among Hollywood studios. MGM had begun courting Rózsa before; they were eventually able to secure his services only by agreeing to a set of conditions unusual among the creative talent who labored for the film factories. For one thing, nobody else would be allowed to touch Rózsa’s scores, nor would he be asked to engage in such doctoring (common practice in Hollywood). He would be permitted to work at home instead of being required to report to the studio. MGM also promised to respect his teaching commitment to USC and to offer him first refusal on all of their films, in effect guaranteeing him the pick of the crop. When the contract was redrawn early in the 1950s, Rózsa extracted an additional concession: he would have three months’ vacation every summer (unpaid, at his own suggestion) in order to compose for the concert hall.

Rózsa’s contract with MGM lasted for 15 years. Its end in 1963 coincided with a sharp falloff in his film work. In the ensuing two decades, he composed only 11 scores of the nearly 100 for which he was responsible. Rózsa saw the more active part of his film career falling into several distinct periods defined by the genres of films he scored. His first period, which began with Korda in England, included the Oriental-fantasy features, such as Thief of Baghdad and The Jungle Book. The second was represented by heavy psychological dramas; prominent among them were Spellbound and The Lost Weekend. The third included a spate of violent films noirs, such as The Killers, Brute Force and Naked City, which depicted the seamy underside of American life after the war. The fourth period, which began at MGM, was marked by the historico-Biblical films for whose music Rózsa is perhaps most famous; they include Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, and El Cid.

Rózsa’s career as a composer for the concert hall, meanwhile, never ceased and even got a boost from his summers off while at MGM, not to mention his free-lance period beginning in the 1960s. Among his more prominent compositions are several commissioned concertos: the Violin Concerto (1953), written for Jascha Heifetz; the Piano Concerto (1967), composed at the request of Leonard Pennario; the Cello Concerto (1968) for János Starker; and the Viola Concerto (1979) for Pinchas Zuckerman. A stroke in 1982 brought Rózsa’s writing for symphony orchestra to a halt, but he continued writing successfully for unaccompanied instruments and also revised earlier works. In effect, he had returned to his musical origins in folk song: “That is where my music began,” he remarked a few years before his death in 1995, “and where it almost certainly will end.”

Rózsa’s musical style is distinctive and – once heard – immediately recognizable. Tony Thomas, one of the principal chroniclers of film music, described Rózsa’s music – polyphonic, chromatic, and intricately textured – as that “of an educated composer whose tastes are definitely those of early-twentieth-century Europe.” This is also to say that Rózsa’s music is tonal. In fact, in his autobiography he calls himself “an unashamed champion of tonality.” As he put it, “Tonality means line; line means melody; melody means song; and song, especially folk song, is the essence of music, because it is the natural, spontaneous and primordial expression of human emotion.” (Rózsa recalled attending a Los Angeles performance of his Sonata for Two Violins in the 1940s and noticing Arnold Schoenberg wince at every tonal turn of the music.) Christopher Palmer, another filmmusic expert who arranged and orchestrated some of Rózsa’s music, found much in common with Puccini: “a passionate sincerity and a felling for strong emotion; a sure sense of theatrical effect; a love of sensuous beauty.” Another Rózsa soulmate, according to Palmer, is Ernest Bloch; for, although Rózsa was not Jewish, his music possesses certain qualities that sometimes suggest as much, including a certain “gravity of tone, intensely elegiac expressiveness…and flamboyant orchestral color.”

Several of these basic characteristics of Rózsa’s style can be attributed to his fascination with Hungarian folk music, which, according to the composer, “has affected virtually every bar I have ever put on paper.” His family’s estate lay north of Budapest in a village called Nagylócz, which was located at the foot of the Mátra Mountains. This area is inhabited by the Palóc, an indigenous Magyar people, who have their own dialect, customs, and costumes. As a boy Rózsa developed a strong affection for this people. He tried transcribing their music, although never in as thorough or as organized a manner as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, two of Rózsa’s musical heroes. Rather than quoting folk music, Rózsa assimilated its spirit and made it a part of his evolving compositional technique. This is evident in one of Rózsa’s early orchestral successes, the Theme, Variations and Finale, which he originally composed in 1933 and revised ten years later in accord with suggestions from Bruno Walter. The theme that opens the piece has the characteristics of a Hungarian folk song but is not of folk origin. Rózsa said that the oboe melody came to him as he left Budapest and bad farewell to his father for what would prove to be the last time. A cursory look at the list of Rózsa’s concert works shows that love of homeland often had an explicit influence; in this regard, it might be noted that Rózsa composed the Overture to a Symphony Concert at the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, which may help to explain its heroic, agitated character.

Rózsa’s scores for several films noirs of the 1940s exhibit another, and appropriately darker, side of his music. Here melody takes a back seat to jagged rhythms, sharp accents, dissonances and other devices that gave these unpleasant stories a bracing, corrosive sound. An example of this kind of writing can be found in the main title sequence to Billy Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity (1944). Not only does the music have a doomy quality entirely in keeping with the sordid events about to unfold; the writing also has a modal character typical of Hungarian folk music. It has been noted, moreover, that, of all of his movie music, that for the films noirs most closely approaches Rózsa’s concert-hall style.

Rózsa’s music was compelling, even passionate, by nature; thus, he was able to evoke maximum emotion from many a love scene, as in the case of Madame Bovary, one of his first features scored while under contract to MGM. The film genre for which the composer is best known, however, is the historical epic; indeed Rózsa was associated with some of the most lavish spectacles of the 1950s and early 1960s. As the authors of a recent history of American film music put it, Rózsa “seems happier underscoring the entrance of an army than the picking of a lock.” While these films often enough fell short of artistic success, they provided their composer with welcome challenges. Ever the musicologist, Rózsa did extensive background research on the instruments and musical sources of the period being recreated on the screen. It has been suggested that his success in evoking the antiquity of Quo Vadis or Ben-Hur is due in part of the influence of Magyar folksong. Its exoticism and links to church modes and the pentatonic scale gave Rózsa a leg up in suggesting ancient times to Western audiences. Or consider Rózsa’s approach to scoring the tournament scene from El Cid. For this epic set in the eleventh century, Rózsa studied the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of over 400 songs in praise of the Virgin Mary collected by King Alfonso X (the Wise) of Castile. Selecting a few melodies and melodic fragments, he developed a thrilling prelude to the pageant of mortal combat.

There is at least one more respect in which Miklós Rózsa might be said to have lived a double life. It is represented by the very ambivalence with which he surveyed his artistic career toward its end, in particular, the time and effort spent on the scoring stage and away from the concert hall. Writing about his own career in the film industry, André Previn recalled how out of place Rózsa seemed in Hollywood, sporting dark European suits under the California sun. Yet, for all of his urbanity and even elitism, Rózsa remained something of a musical populist. Often disdainful of the shallowness of the movie colony, Rózsa acknowledged that film scoring kept him in touch with the public and constantly reminded him of his purpose in writing music, namely, communication. In his concert-hall works no less than in his film scores, Rózsa never lost sight of that purpose. Perhaps that should come as no surprise; after all, the folk music that inspired and inspired so much of his own work would not have existed without the folk.

American Hungarian Museum, No. 74, 2001

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James Krukones was born in Chicago,Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1988, he has taught at John Carroll University, where he chairs the Department of History. A specialist on Russia and Eastern Europe, Dr. Krukones also teaches courses on Soviet cinema and the relationship between history and film. His publications include a variety of articles for journals such as the American Historical Review, The Historian, Russian History, Slavic Review etc. Dr. Krukones has enjoyed the music of Miklós Rózsa since 1960, when he saw Ben-Hur at the Michael Todd Theatre in downtown Chicago.