Wednesday April 18 was the 100th anniversary of Miklós Rózsa's birth. He died 10 years ago just a few months after his 90th birthday. Rózsa was one of the first composers to come to Hollywood that didn't try to emulate the sound of Korngold or Steiner (and central European late Romanticism). He was also one of the few composers of Hollywood's Golden Age to maintain a parallel career as a composer of concert music as well as film music with lots of great stuff including a violin concerto for Jascha Heifetz, a cello concerto for Gregory Piatagorsky and a large-scale symphony that smacks of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (written about 20 years after Rózsa's Symphony). His autobiography A Double Life is both an entertaining read and a scathing critique of Hollywood during its Golden Age (his story about how he met Stravinsky is particularly entertaining).
Rózsa is interesting also in that had three distinct phases to his film scoring career. The first deals largely with exoticism like The Jungle Book and The Thief of Baghdad. The second phase deals largely with psychological dramas like Hitchcock's Spellbound, Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. The third phase deals largely with historical epics. This began when he signed with MGM and was given one of the best contracts a composer had received since Korngold worked for Jack Warner. It was in this part of his career that he got to dive in to musicological research that he loved so much (his Ph.D. was in musicology from the Leipzig Conservatory). This period includes films like Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, King of Kings (Rózsa is the only composer to ever be required in the course of his assignments to score the crucifixion 3 times!), Knights of the Round Table, El Cid, Beau Brummell and Sodom and Gomorrah.
Today's playlist is to be drawn mostly from the historical epic category...mostly.
Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ
El Cid
Knights of the Round Table (good score, baaaad film)
Julius Caesar
Ivanhoe
The Epic Film Music of Miklós Rózsa
Spellbound: The Classic Film Scores of Miklós Rózsa
King of Kings
Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer's first version of Star Trek IV)
Yeah. I'm a big Rózsa fan.
