Miklós Rózsa (1907-1995).
What Teller was to nuclear fission and Trauner was to film sets, Miklós Rózsa was to film music. He was an American-Hungarian musician who earned his reputation in Hollywood. He won three Oscars for his screen music – in 1945 for Spellbound (Hitchcock) for the two brilliant main themes with psychoanalytical content, in 1947 for A Double Life (G. Cukor), and in 1959 for Ben-Hur (Wyler). And he was nominated for the Film Academy’s prize no less than 16 times.

He composed the melodies of Jungle Books while he was still in London (1942) for director Vincent Korda, with Alexander Korda as producer. Two years previously he had been highly successful with the sweetly melodious music of the thousand and one nights that sounded very much like Pest (The Thief of Baghdad). The script for that film was written by Lajos Bíró. There are many Hungarian names on the list of Rózsa’s films. Alexander Korda enticed Rózsa to London-Film in the late thirties. In 1937 he left his career in classical music and turned to applied music with an insignificant Marlene Dietrich film (Knight without Armour). Zoltán Korda directed The Four Feathers (1939), a film in colour noted for its battle scenes. Rózsa wrote the music. Alexander Korda directed Vivien Leigh in the title role of Lady Hamilton, with Laurence Olivier as Admiral Nelson (1941). Rózsa wrote the music. Then he went over to the United States. At United Artists he was the composer for Lubitsch’s comedy To Be or Not to Be (1942).

Billy Wilder: Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and The Lost Weekend (1945) mark his achievements in Hollywood. He switched contracts from M.G.M. to Paramount.

1947: The Song of Scheherazade – he lavished his “prodigal talent” on a bio-pic of Rimsky-Korsakov. Minolli’s Madame Bovary (1949). Big budget films came back into fashion. Rózsa composed the music for Quo vadis (1951). Then Ivanhoe (1952): Walter Scott on horseback; Julius Caesar (1953): Shakespeare with Marlon Brando; Knights of the Round Table (1953): the Middle Ages in cinemascope; The King’s Thief (1955): conspiracy in the court of the English king Charles II; Diane de Poitiers (1955): love in the court of the French king Henri II; Ben-Hur (1959): the Ancient World in full colour (a budget of 15 million, ten years of preparation, a caste of a hundred thousand, fourteen months of shooting, eleven Oscars, and all we remember is the twenty-minute carriage race filmed by Marton), Sodom and Gomorra (1963): Sergio Leone begins the story of the Bible and got bored with it, Robert Aldrich finished it. Rózsa is invited to give impressive sounds to blockbuster films. He plays in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), in fact: he even appears in person on the screen, as the conductor of the Russian ballet.

Péter Molnár Gál