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During this period, he didn’t forsake his concert work. Rozsa had become a regular conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, a fraternity that included Felix Slatkin (co-founder of the legendary Hollywood String Quartet, and father of the celebrated maestro Leonard Slatkin) and Alfred Newman. Additionally, since 1945, he had been a member of the faculty of the University of Southern California, as a professor in the Music Department specializing in filmusic. And he’d continued composing such pieces as his Lullaby and Madrigal for Spring, the solo piano piece Kaleidoscope, the motet To Everything There is a Season, and his First String Quartet. Rozsa’s contract with the studio gave him complete autonomy from the studio in his concert music activities. In 1953, Jascha Heifetz, having seen some of Rozsa’s sketches for a proposed violin concerto, commissioned the piece from Rozsa – it was premiered in 1956 and recorded the same year, and has proved an enduringly popular work. Its success led to the 1961 joint commission from Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, for a piece utilizing violin and cello, the Sinfonia Concertante.

The passage of time, however, had dimmed some of the critical enthusiasm for Rozsa’s works. Schoenberg died in 1951, respected and even renowned even if only a tiny portion of the concert-going public appreciated the work done in the serialist mode of composition that he’d devised. But the music academics, along with a growing number of influential critics, did embrace the modernism embodied by his work and those who followed, and by the early 1950’s, Rozsa, along with such surviving post-Romantic figures as Vaughan Williams and Ernest Mooch, were increasingly regarded as anachronisms. That the commissions kept coming, the audiences applauded, and performances continued to be scheduled by the likes of Ormandy, among others, didn’t make any difference to the people writing the critical record.

Additionally, the most influential music critics, based in New York, had never accepted Rozsa’s music. It is possible they genuinely didn’t like it (the lead critic for the New York Times in the 1950’s never accepted Gustav Mahler’s symphonies either), but some of it was surely a result of prejudice against a Hollywood-based composer, especially one who had come from Europe and bypassed New York in favor of Los Angeles as his new home.

“Miklos Rozsa has been known here previously as the deviser of numerous scores for Hollywood motion pictures,” wrote Jerome D. Bohm in The New York Times on November 5, 1943. “His Theme, Variations and Finale… reveals him as a clever eclectic with a wide acquaintance with the works of the Russian neo-classical school and of such modem composers as Weinberger. He knows all the tricks of the trade and utilizes them with something less than discretion. Some of the variations, which are based on a pseudo-Hungarian folk tune, begin pleasantly enough, but after a few measures of relative calm the composer cannot resist the temptation to unleash the full resources of the modem orchestra in the lushest of instrumental combinations. To show us that he has studied counterpoint he makes frequent and pretentious use of the least complicated of contrapuntal devices-canonic imitation.”

By contrast, reviews from other quarters were consistently more enthusiastic, Mildred Norton of the Saturday Review describing the Violin Concerto, in particular, as “that rarest of concert phenomena – a new work that is instantly accessible without being in any way trite… energized by unflagging thematic and rhythmic immediacy.”

Strangely enough, in a sequence of events that nobody has ever explained, during this same era, a part of one of Rozsa’s most successful works turned up as background music, not in a film, but on a television show. The sixth variation of the Theme, Variations, and Finale, designated “Allegro molto agitato e tumultoso,” surfaced in four of the second season episodes of THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, starring George Reeves, accompanying climactic action sequences in the episodes “The Clown Who Cried,” “Jungle Devil,” and “The Jolly Roger,” and overlaying a montage sequence in “The Machine That Could Plot Crimes.” Rozsa himself was unaware of the precise circumstances leading to these appearances, which were completely uncredited. Curiously, all four shows were also linked together by the fact that they were re-edited for theatrical distribution as a feature film the following year.

The 1960’s saw the debut of such large-scale orchestral pieces as the Nottumo Ungherese, a Piano Concerto composed for the virtuoso Leonard Pennario, and the Cello Concerto, written for celebrated cello virtuoso Janos Starker. The 1970’s saw Rozsa turn toward such solo works as the Valse Crepusculaire for piano, although he also completed a Viola Concerto for Pinchas Zuckerman, which was premiered in 1984.

Ironically, Rozsa’s film work slowed to a near standstill soon after the completion of BEN-HUR, his most popular score and the first movie soundtrack to earn a “Volume 2” album release. He’d had almost a year to work on the music for BEN-HUR, and while some of it clearly borrowed from his earlier music for QUO VADIS, he’d also gone further than the earlier epic had allowed, and come up with more usable music-nearly two hours’ worth at latest count. But MGM was entering the most fallow period in its history. Major stars of the past were not drawing people to the box office the way they had been, and people simply weren’t paying money to see the kind of serious dramas and large-scale musicals that had helped keep the balance sheets in the black for years.

Rozsa manipulated his way out of working on the studio’s remake of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, happily throwing that crumb to Bronislau Kaper, a longtime music department employee, by getting loaned out to independent producer Samuel Bronston for two epic films, KING OF KINGS and EL CID. Nicholas Ray’s KING OF KINGS (1960) wasn’t a movie that Rozsa wanted to work on, having just completed BEN-HUR, which covered the same subject matter and period, and the studio would have been happier if Bronston hadn’t been producing it – but as long as he was, MGM co-opted this potential rival to BEN-HUR’s business by putting up the money he needed to finish it in exchange for the distribution rights. The movie got bigger in conception, which made the job of director Ray – already in over his head for this sort of epic – even harder, and Rozsa was sent to Europe and brought aboard MGM’s ready-made follow-up to its own Biblical hit.

Rozsa’s score for KING OF KINGS isn’t as inspired as his work for BEN-HUR, but it does hold the movie together in conjunction with Orson Welles’ narration (written by Ray Bradbury, incidentally), and along with the performance by Siobhan McKenna, is one of the most worthwhile elements of the movie. As with BEN-HUR, a deluxe boxed set version of the soundtrack was released, complete with a souvenir book giving the production history of the movie.

EL CID (1961) gave Rozsa a chance to research and explore Spanish music. By his own description, this was his last important film score of the 1960’s. He gave Robert Aldrich’s misbegotten Old Testament epic SODOM AND GOMORRAH (1962) – even more ill-suited to Aldrich, the director of small-scale gems like ATTACK!, than KING OF KINGS had been for the director of THEY LIVE BY NIGHT – to no avail. When he returned to Hollywood in 1963, he discovered that nobody, including MGM, was making the kind of serious dramatic films or costume epics that required his talents.

His contract with MGM was ended after 14 years, although he returned to the studio briefly, to work on THE VI.P.’S (1963) and, later on, THE POWER (1966). The latter production, although disappointing on its own terms as a science fiction thriller, raised some interesting possibilities – not long after its release, producer/director George Pal secured the rights to the science fiction novel LOGAN’S RUN, and was supposed to produce it. He became ill, however, and the project languished until the mid-1970’s when Saul David launched it with Michael Anderson in the director’s chair and Jerry Goldsmith doing the music. A Rozsa score to LOGAN’S RUN might’ve been fascinating.

Rozsa returned to the concert hall, and in 1965 rerecorded four of his most popular serious works, the Theme, Variations and Finale, the Three Hungarian Sketches, the Hungarian Nocturne, and the Concert Overture, for RCA Records. Throughout the 1960’s, when he wasn’t writing new works for the concert hall, Rozsa busied himself with various labels, re-recording his classic film scores with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra (Capitol/Angel Records) and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Polydor and London Records), along with the occasional new score (Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES).

By the 1970’s, Rozsa found himself to be an elder statesman among film composers. Newman was gone, Steiner retired, and Tiomkin, after picking up the few assignments left in Samuel Bronston’s failing production operation in Spain, had disappeared after the early 1970’s to pass away in 1979. No one was more surprised than Rozsa, however, when he discovered that a new generation of directors, who had grown up admiring the movies he had worked on in the 1930’s and 1944, wanted him to work on their movies. With the passing of Bernard Herrmann in 1975, Rozsa was the last of his generation of filmusic giants, and his work, old and new, was suddenly in demand again. Recordings of old scores were being made, some conducted by him and others conducted by younger hands eager to interpret his work

His film composing career entered its Indian Summer with work on Alain Resnais’s PROVIDENCE (1977), Billy Wilder’s FEDORA (1978), Nicholas Meyer’s TIME AFTER TIME (1979), Richard Marquand’s EYE OF THE NEEDLE (1980), and Carl Reiner’s DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID (1982), starring Steve Martin, the latter allowing Rozsa to rescore clips from films he had originally written the music for 40 years earlier. TIME AFTER TIME, a science-fiction/fantasy thriller built around the persona of H.G. Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell) – who, ironically enough, like Rozsa, had worked for London Films in the mid-1930’s – earned Rozsa yet another Oscar nomination.

Despite the onset of advancing age and a debilitating stroke, which combined to end his career in the concert hall, Rozsa retained an active interest in all of his music into the end of the 1980’s. By that time, honors were beginning to accumulate – in addition to a Golden Soundtrack Award presented to him by ASCAP on his 80th birthday in 1987, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley declared “Miklos Rozsa Day” accompanied by a recital of his cello piece Toccata Capricciosa, and the presentation of birthday greetings from President and Mrs. Reagan, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother Elizabeth, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the American ambassador to Hungary.

In the early 1990’s, Rozsa was advising and assisting conductor James Sedares in a series of new recordings of his major concert works and film scores for the Koch International label, and even resurrected his Symphony in Three Movements, which he withdrew from publication in 1930. The latest of those recordings, the music from El Cid, was completed two months before Rozsa’s death.

A post-Romantic as much as a modernist, Miklos Rozsa’s work for both the concert hall and movies embraced a musical world that most musicians had abandoned by the middle of the twentieth century. His music was tonal and melodic, sometimes achingly so, reminiscent in many ways of Dvorak and Janacek, but beginning where they left off-and based on Hungarian sources rather than Czech inspiration. He could bring the remembered delight of Budapest before World War I alive in his music, or lift the rhythms, harmonies and melodies of Hungarian folk music to symphonic heights-and he could underscore the most savage and noble sides of the human condition, from brutal, casual murder in THE KILLING (1946) to the teachings of Jesus in BEN-HUR (1959).

Bruce Eder is a film reviewer and laserdisc producer who has written far Interview, Current Biography, Newsday, The Village Voice, and Calcimine Magazine. He also writes about and produces classical CD’s, and is a contributor to the All-Music Guide.

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