The Eighth Tribe, 1976 (3. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1976-05-01 / 5. szám
Page 4 THE EIGHTH TRIBE May, 1976 move to Hollywood, where Rózsa has lived ever since. (He became an American citizen in 1946 and now has a wife and two children. A European at heart, though, he spends his summers in Italy.) The war years in America brought film assignments emphasizing crime and psychological disturbances which Rózsa scored most effectively with the sharp, irregular rhythms and violent outbursts of a style native to him but sometimes new and disturbing to a Hollywogd where musical schmaltz was more often the rule. Still, Rózsa, along with Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, and Franz Waxman, came to be recognized as one of the early masters of the new art of dramatic film scoring, at its infrequent best an extension of the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Spellbound,* A Double Life,* Brute Force, and The Killers are the leading works of this period. These scores are simpler in texture than the early concert music but otherwise remarkably similar. Beginning in 1949, however, a long association with M-G-M brought out the more romantic and exotic elements of his style as he became associated with historical subjects in Madame Bovary, Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, Julius Caesar, Lust For Life, and many others. This period was climaxed by the “epics” Ben-Hur,* King Of Kings, and El Cid. In all of these, Rózsa’s musicological training has combined with the folk accent and dramatic flair to produce film music of historical authenticity as well as great power and beauty. Since 1963 Rózsa has worked less in films, though his Golden Voyage of Sinbad was well received in 1974. The industry drifted into a miserable period of rock-oriented music and lost interest in its old masters, while Rózsa at the same time became dissatisfied with increasing sex, horror and violence on the screen. Instead he has turned increasingly to the concert hall, an area he had never really abandoned even while scoring three or four films a year and teaching film music at the University of Southern California. There was a dark and violent Concerto for Strings in 1943, an exciting Piano Sonata in 1948, and a String Quartet in 1950. Jascha Heifetz commissioned the Violin Concerto and premiered and recorded it in 1956. This led to similar works for other distinguished soloists: violin-cello (Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky), piano (Leonard Pennario cello (János Starker), and currently a Viola Concerto for Pinchas Zukerman, which wiU be op. 37. The * Received an Academy Award. Many other Rózsa scores have also been nominated for this honor. orchestral Tripartita will have its first American performances next season in Washington and Philadelphia. This music is less well known than it might be since the press and some corners of the musical world affected for many years a foolish snobbery at film music and even at the other works of composers who deigned to write for the screen. Fortunately, all that is ending now. Rózsa has been especially favored by the renaissance of interest in film music. His old recordings are being reissued and new ones are being made. In 1974 he returned to Budapest for the first time on forty-three years to give a concert of his own works and to sign 620 autographs at a special screening of A Bagdadi Tolvaj. A short critical study has been published by Christopher Palmer (London: Breitkopf and Hartel, 1975), and no fewer than four societies have been founded to honor and study his music in Australia, Belgium, France, and the U.S. The largest of these has members all over the world whose enthusiasm is living proof of the beauty and power that this Hungarian-American has expressed in his musical career. Further information can be obtained from The Miklós Rózsa Society, 303 East 8th Street, Bloomington, IN 47401. . John Fitzpatrick
