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Miklos Rozsa’s death last July 27 at the age of 88 represented far more than the passing of a giant in the field of filmusic. In addition to being a three-time Oscar recipient and multiple nominee for his work as a composer, Rozsa was the last of a generation of composers, directors, producers, artists, designers, and writers whose training and sensibilities derived from nineteenth century Europe, all of whom helped elevate American movies from their coarse (though vibrant) origins into something resembling – in execution, if not intent – high art.

The return of his music to the New York Philharmonic in late October of 1995 (see review that follows article) illustrates the cultural distances covered by his career. Two pieces of his filmusic, the Madame Bovary Waltz and the desert music from BEN-HUR, were performed along with the most successful of his 1930’s concert works, the Theme, Variations and Finale.

That Rozsa could have had a work such as the Theme, Variations and Finale embraced by conductors as different in temperament and expertise as Charles Munch, Bruno Walter, Carl Schuricht, Karl Bohm, Eugene Ormandy, and Leonard Bernstein, set him apart from the two surviving elder statesmen of filmusic, Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith. Both have written “serious” compositions for the concert hall, but neither one – born in America during the 1920’s, when Rozsa already had a publishing contract from Breitkopf and Hartel – could ever seriously consider a career writing for the concert hall. By the time either was at an age to consider what sort of career he wanted in music, the concert hall didn’t offer even the possibility of supporting a new composer, as it did to Rozsa in pre-World War II Europe. By contrast, the movies – to which Rozsa came only gradually – beckoned as a more lucrative creative medium in which to make music.

Unlike his successors, Rozsa was of a generation of musicians whose training and orientation were almost exclusively classical – the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, Dvorak, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, and Richard Strauss was central to their being. And those classics didn’t have to compete with jazz or commercial pop songs. The music of the European Classical and Romantic eras wasn’t one of the languages he wrote in – it was the only language in which he wrote. He was the last of this century’s post-Romantic composers. As a movie composer he might have slotted in next to Komgold and Herrmann, but as a serious composer he belonged in the company of Vaughan Williams, Respighi, Janacek, and Bloch.

It was always a marvel to this writer how far Rozsa had traveled from his origins, and how important those origins remained to his work right to the end. My first experience of a Rozsa score came at the age of seven or eight, in 1962 or 1963, when I first saw Alexander Koala’s production of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940). A local television station in New York ran the movie on Thanksgiving Day as a special event, probably aimed at the children home from school that day. I watched it on a black-and-white set, which should have dampened my appreciation of the Technicolor movie. But it didn’t, because of Rozsa’s music: from the opening fanfare (inspired, as I realized years later, at least in part, by Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben) to the gently swirling arabesque accompanying the Princess’s procession, the “Djinn’s Flight Theme,” and the Debussy-like chorus accompanying the Old King’s story of the Land of Legend, the music had all the color the movie needed, in the absence of the real article, to communicate the filmmakers’ intent.

He reached his teens with his heart set upon a career in music, but his father wanted his eldest son to follow a more practical path, preferably in business or science. Rozsa later joined and became a key member of the Franz Liszt Society. His interest in modem music, especially that of Bartok and Kodaly, both of whom were regarded as dangerous modernists by the conservative school authorities, was discouraged by his teachers. One must remember that this era was one of great political and social upheaval in Hungary, which had only come into existence as a fully independent country, without a reigning monarch as the head of state, after the breakup of the Austin-Hungarian empire following World War I. Hungarian nationalism was still finding its voice and its place in the newly constituted Hungarian state, riven by political divisions.

Rozsa was branded a musical rebel by school administrators for a pair of speeches he made defending the work of his two idols. As a budding composer, however, he was vindicated when the Liszt Society granted him a medal for one of his own compositions, which was clearly in a modernist mode.

In 1925, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig as a chemistry major, to satisfy his father’s wishes. Within his first year, however, he was rescued by Herman Grabner, a composition teacher who had studied with Max Reger. Reger wrote to Rozsa’s father proclaiming: “if there is one man who has the right to become a composer, it is your son.” The elder Rozsa finally acquiesced in to his son’s wishes, and in 1926, Rozsa switched enrollment to the Leipzig Conservatory where, in addition to Grabner, his teachers included Karl Straube, the cantor of Thomaskirche, with whom Rozsa studied choral music.

During his years at the Conservatory, Rozsa wrote his first formal compositions, the Trio-Serenade for Strings (Op. 1), the Piano Quintet in F minor for Strings (Op. 1), the Piano Quintet in F minor (Op. 2), the Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra (Op. 3), and his Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song (Op. 4). The Piano Quintet so impressed Straube that he brought it and his student to the attention of the major publishing house Breitkopf & Hartel, which agreed to publish it and the Trio-Serenade, and granted Rozsa a long-term publishing contract before his graduation.

Following his graduation cum laude in 1929, Rozsa worked for a time in Leipzig as assistant to Grabner. In 1930, he finished the score to his first large-scale work, a Symphony (Op. 6), and set about getting it performed. The Symphony, which was finally recorded in abridged, reconstructed form in 1993 by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under James Sedares for the Koch International label, reveals the source of much of Rozsa’s subsequent film work – in just the first movement the musical material itself foreshadows not only his most famous concert work, the Theme, Variations, and Finale, but elements of the scores to such films as THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, THE JUNGLE BOOK, THE NAKED CITY and QUO VADIS.

Straube was impressed with the results of the music as written, and sent Rozsa to see Wilhelm Furtwangler, then chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Furtwangler was unable to see Rozsa, but the composer fared somewhat better when he spoke to Bruno Walter, the conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and, along with Toscanini, Furtwangler’s greatest rival in the top rank of the world’s conductors. Walter felt that Rozsa was extremely gifted, but thought the piece too long, running close to 50 minutes, and felt it would be impossible to justify the rehearsal time for such a work by a new composer. He promised, however, that if Rozsa presented him with a shorter work of equal merit, he would arrange for a performance. Rozsa received similar responses from Ernst Von Donanyi and Pierre Monteux, and he himself later admitted that the symphony’s length exceeded its originality or invention.

At their urging, he began devising orchestral works of more modest dimensions. He moved to Paris in 1931, continuing his composition activities, and during the spring of 1932, his Serenade received a performance in Budapest under Dohnanyi. Among those in the audience was Richard Strauss, then at the height of his fame as the most renowned of living composers. Strauss strongly encouraged Rozsa to continue writing music.

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