Miklós Rózsa (Hungarian: [ˈmikloːʃ ˈroːʒɒ]; April 18, 1907 – July 27, 1995) was a Hungarian and American composer. Best known for his nearly 100 film scores, he nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout what he called his "double life".
Rózsa achieved early success in Europe with his orchestral Theme, Variations, and Finale (Op. 13) of 1933, and became prominent in the film industry from such early scores as The Four Feathers (1939) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). The latter project brought him to Hollywood when production was transferred from wartime Britain, and Rózsa remained in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1946.
During his Hollywood career, he received a total of 17 Academy Award nominations, winning three times for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959). He was also a César Award winner, a three-time Golden Globe nominee, and a Grammy Award nominee. His concert works were championed by such major artists as Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, and János Starker.
Miklós Rózsa was born in Budapest and was introduced to classical and folk music by his mother, Regina (née Berkovits), a pianist who had studied with pupils of Franz Liszt, and his father, Gyula, a well-to-do industrialist and landowner who loved Hungarian folk music. Both parents were of Jewish origin. Gyula's father, Moritz Rosenberg, had changed the family name to Rózsa in 1887. Gyula Rózsa had inherited from his father a Budapest shoe factory, which brought him to the capital around 1900. Like his father, and despite his landowning status, Gyula had socialist leanings, which he expressed in a pamphlet entitled To Whom Does the Hungarian Soil Belong? Young Miklós grew up in a home of enlightened values and musical culture. His only sibling, Edith, was born seven years later.
Rózsa's maternal uncle Lajos Berkovits, violinist with the Budapest Opera, presented young Miklós with his first instrument at the age of five. He later took up the viola and piano. By the age of eight 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 Hungarians. While deeply admiring the folk-based nationalism of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, Rózsa sought to find his own way as a composer. Fearing that Kodály's dominance at Budapest's Franz Liszt Academy tended to suppress individualism, he sought to study music in Germany. He enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1925, ostensibly to study chemistry at the behest of his practical-minded father. Determined to become a composer, he transferred to the Leipzig Conservatory the following year. There he studied composition with Hermann Grabner, successor to Max Reger. He also studied choral music with (and later assisted) Karl Straube at the Thomaskirche, where Johann Sebastian Bach had once been the kapellmeister. Rózsa emerged from these years with a deep respect for the German musical tradition, which would always temper the Hungarian nationalism of his musical style.
Rózsa's first two published works, the String Trio, Op. 1, and the Piano Quintet, Op. 2, were issued in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel. In 1929, he received his diplomas cum laude. During the Leipzig years he essayed a single-movement Violin Concerto and a lengthy Symphony, Op. 6. Neither work was published, and Rózsa was discouraged on a trip to Berlin when Wilhelm Furtwängler did not find time to consider the Symphony. Rozsa suppressed both works, but eventually allowed the Symphony (minus its lost scherzo) to be recorded in 1993.
For a time he remained in Leipzig as Grabner's assistant, but at the suggestion of the French organist and composer Marcel Dupré, he moved to Paris in 1931. There he composed chamber music and a Serenade for small orchestra, Op. 10 (later greatly revised as Hungarian Serenade, Op. 25). It was premiered in Budapest by Ernő Dohnányi, who had advised Rózsa to offer a shorter work than the Symphony. Richard Strauss was in the audience, and his approval meant more to the young composer than the presence of Habsburg royalty and the prince regent, Miklós Horthy. The subsequent Theme, Variations, and Finale, Op. 13, was especially well received and was performed by conductors such as Charles Munch, Karl Böhm, Georg Solti, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein.
Rózsa was introduced to film music in 1934 by his friend, the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger. Following a concert which featured their respective compositions, Honegger mentioned that he supplemented his income as a composer of film scores, including the film Les Misérables (1934). Rózsa went to see it and was greatly impressed by the opportunities the film medium offered. However, no film scoring opportunities presented themselves in Paris, and Rózsa had to support himself by reliance on a wealthy patron and by composing light music under the pseudonym Nic Tomay. It was not until Rózsa moved to London that he was hired to compose his first film score for Knight Without Armour (1937), produced by his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda. Around the same time he also scored Thunder in the City (1937) for another Hungarian filmmaker, Ákos Tolnay, who had previously urged Rózsa to come to England. While the latter film was the first to open, Rózsa always cited the more prestigious Korda project as his film debut. He joined the staff of Korda's London Films, and scored the studio's epic The Four Feathers (1939). Korda and the studio's music director, Muir Mathieson, brought Rózsa onto their Arabian Nights fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1940) when the operetta-style approach of the original composer, Oscar Straus, was deemed unsuitable. Production was transferred to Hollywood when the war broke out, and Rozsa completed his score there in 1940.
The music earned him his first Academy Award nomination. While Korda remained in Hollywood, Rózsa was effectively the music director of his organization. In his capacity, he supervised the scoring of To Be or Not to Be (1942), and contributed at least one sequence of his own music. His own U.S. scores for Korda included Lydia (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941) and The Jungle Book (1942). From the last of these emerged The Jungle Book Suite for narrator and orchestra, which became popular as narrated by the film's star, Sabu, and was soon recorded in New York by RCA. The 78-rpm album became the first substantial recording of Hollywood film music. It was later recorded with Rózsa conducting the Frankenland State Orchestra of Nuremberg and Leo Genn as narrator.
In 1943, now associated with Paramount, Rózsa scored the first of several collaborations with director Billy Wilder, Five Graves to Cairo. That same year he also scored the similarly themed Humphrey Bogart film Sahara. In 1944, his scores for a second Wilder collaboration, Double Indemnity, and for The Woman of the Town, both received Academy Award nominations.
In 1944, Rózsa was hired by producer David O. Selznick to compose the score for Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. The scoring process was contentious, with producer, director and composer all expressing considerable dissatisfaction with each other. Numerous changes were made in the editing by Audray Granville, Selznick's assistant and de facto music director. The almost farcical history of artists at cross-purposes has been documented by Jack Sullivan (Hitchcock's Music, 2006) and especially Nathan Platte (Making Music in Selznick's Hollywood, 2018). Nevertheless, the film was a hit after its release in late 1945. The combination of lush melody for the romance and frenzied expressionism for the suspense scenes proved irresistible. Rózsa's pioneering (for Hollywood) use of the theremin contributed to the effect, and the attention it generated likely influenced his Academy Award nomination. Two of his other 1945 scores were also nominated, The Lost Weekend and A Song to Remember, but the Oscar was awarded to Spellbound. Although Selznick was unhappy with the score, his innovative radio promotion of the music contributed to both the film's and the composer's success. Rózsa eventually arranged his themes as the Spellbound Concerto, which (in multiple versions) has enjoyed lasting success in concerts and recordings. The composer Jerry Goldsmith cited Spellbound as a key influence in his decision to seek a career in film music.