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A 1933 concert in Paris by the pianist Clara Haskil featured several of Rozsa’s chamber works, but his major breakthrough took place a year later with the premiere of his Theme, Variations & Finale under Otto Volkmann. Charles Munch happily took it into his own repertory, and the piece was soon performed under such conductors as Bruno Walter, Karl Bohm, Carl Schuricht, Eugene Ormandy, and later, Leonard Bernstein. The first American performance of a Rozsa piece took place in 1937, when the Theme, Variations, and Finale was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock.

Despite having written a major work that had been played by all the top orchestras of Europe in less than two years, Rozsa was not earning a living from his work as a composer, and was eager to rectify this situation. While living in Paris in 1934, he learned that his friend, composer Arthur Honnegerwho – who had given him some important assistance in putting the finishing touches on the Theme, Variations, and Finale – had written the music for a film version of LES MISERABLES. He’d never considered movies as a potential creative outlet up until that time, and, in fact, had hardly seen any movies, but he went to see the film and was impressed with the music and the manner in which it enhanced the movie.

In 1935, Rozsa moved to London, where his ballet Hungarica was performed that same year. One person in attendance was the director Jacques Feyder, who was impressed with the music. Two years later, Feyder was engaged by expatriate Hungarian movie mogul Alexander Korda’s London Films to direct an adventure film called KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR. Based on a James Hilton novel and starring Marlene Dietiich and Robert Donat, the movie was a major production, and Feyder sought out Rozsa as composer of the score.

Rozsa met with Dietrich and Alexander Korda’s brother Vincent, and was duly engaged as a composer. At virtually the same time, he received another filmusic commission for a second movie, THUNDER IN THE CITY (1937), a satire starring Edward G. Robinson. Rozsa suddenly found himself with two commissions for film scores and not a clue as to how to proceed. “I hadn’t the faintest notion of what should be done,” he recalled of this double-barreled introduction to movie music composition, in an interview with Howard Thompson in The New York Times (August 5, 1951). “Actually, I had seen only a few films then… It was a nice frame-up on the part of Marlene and Jacques.”

Rozsa’s natural gifts for melody, along with his already formidable skills as an orchestrator saw him through the KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR assignment, and the result was a score quite unlike any ever devised for a film in England, surging with color and power in an almost kaleidoscopic manner. That the movie was a success in Europe and America didn’t hurt, and brought even more notice to Rozsa from the producers.

Up to that time, the British film industry, when it looked toward the concert hall for composers, had been limited to the Elgarian themes of Arthur Bliss (whose music had graced Korda’s 1936 film THINGS TO COME). Rozsa’s music, by contrast, had a central European flavor, vaguely reminiscent of Max Steiner in its density but closer in texture to Kodaly, or even Dvorak – had Dvorak been born Hungarian instead of Czech.

Alexander Korda and London Films recognized talent when they saw it, especially when it was Hungarian-born talent, and Rozsa was immediately engaged as a composer by the studio. During the next three years, he scored such classic movies as THE SPY IN BLACK, THE DIVORCE OF LADY X, and THE FOUR FEATHERS. The latter film, depicting the Anglo-Egyptian army’s re-conquest of the Sudan more than a decade after Gordon’s defeat at Khartoum, marked Rozsa’s introduction to ethnic music – he studied every piece of Sudanese and North African music that he could find at the British museum, and several of the melodies found their way into his final version of the film’s score.

In all likelihood, Rozsa never would have been allowed this much freedom in a Hollywood production of the same era. The Korda organization, however, appreciated having Rozsa on its staff precisely for his willingness to do the real work involved in making a good score, and this in an era before there was any money to be made from the commercial release of soundtrack recordings. (That would come later, and Rozsa would be there, too).

Amidst all of this activity, Rozsa continued his composing career for the concert hall and began collecting honors, some of them quite unexpected. In 1937 and 1938, he received the Franz Josef Prize for composition from the Hungarian government – both events a major surprise to Rozsa, who hadn’t set foot in Budapest since 1925 and had no constituency that he knew of within the pro-fascist Hungarian government. And in 1939 his Three Hungarian Sketches (op. 14) was presented at the International Music Festival in Baden-Baden, although Rozsa didn’t attend, despite an invitation to do so, with the trip to be paid for by the German government. The London newspapers had printed warnings against British subjects traveling to Germany, which by then had annexed Czechoslovakia and was making threats against Poland’s Danzig Corridor, and he felt it wise to follow this advice despite his not being a British subject.

During this bleak era of European history, Rozsa was also confronted by the political realities around him. At a 1938 meeting in Paris, in connection with a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass by his former mentor Karl Straube and the Thomanerchoir, he saw his former teacher again, and was disturbed by Frau Straube’s gloating over the German domination of the recently annexed Austria, and the distinctly Aryan appearance of the members of the boys’ choir.

If World War II had not intervened, Rozsa might have remained in England indefinitely, writing for the European concert halls and the Denham soundstages with equal facility while earning a comfortable living and garnering increased recognition. But just as Hitler was proceeding with his grand plans of conquest – which would dose off Europe’s concert halls for the next six years – Korda was preparing his grandest film project, which was to be the flashpoint of Rozsa’s career, and would take him farther from Leipzig than he’d ever thought of going.

THE THIEF OF BAGDAD was the biggest production ever conceived by London Films, a strong statement when one recalls THINGS TO COME (1936) and THE FOUR FEATHERS (1939). Essentially a remake and rewrite of the 1924 Raoul Walsh/Douglas Fairbanks Sr. silent, it was to be the grandest fantasy film ever made, and use every resource at the command of the Korda organization.

But both the direction and the music for THE THIEF OF BAGDAD were a source of acrimony for Korda and London Films. The studio had – unwisely, as it turned out – contracted Ludwig Berger (a talented theater director who had turned to movies in the 1920’s) as director of the movie. Berger had made a successful fantasy film some years earlier called CINDERELLA, and, in one of those moves that falls under the heading of “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he was commissioned to make this Arabian Nights fantasy. From the very start, he’d conceived of the movie in terms that Korda found stilted as well as too small, and among other potentially disastrous decisions, had chosen operetta composer Oscar Straus to do the score. Korda liked neither Berger’s approach to the film nor Straus’s music, and wanted both of them off the picture.

This resulted in an intense psychological campaign by the studio chief – Rozsa was placed in an office adjoining Berger’s, and was told to play portions of his proposed THIEF OF BAGDAD score on the piano at every possible moment when the director was within earshot. (Michael Powell, in his first autobiography, describes this scene as an extremely pleasant and enlivening daily occurrence at London Films). Eventually Berger couldn’t resist asking what it was that Rozsa was working on, and the composer told him he was working out some ideas for THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. Rozsa then played his idea for “Dance of the Sllvermald” for the director Berger’s first reaction was to insist that Oscar Straus had already completed this part of the score, as well as several songs, and that nothing more would be needed. Rozsa, doing as Korda had bidden him, simply played more possible material for the film.

Finally Berger relented, realizing that Straus’s lumpy, static operetta-like music couldn’t possibly work as well as what he was hearing from Rozsa, and went to Korda, asking to use Rozsa’s music but unsure how to tell Straus his score was to be dropped. Korda got the Rozsa music he wanted, Straus received his fee (under protest over the indignity of his score being turned down), and Berger was shunted aside with a co-director’s credit, finishing his contract with Korda and his career in films.

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