# Miklós Rózsa Appreciation Thread



## Darren Durann (Jan 9, 2018)

It's quite possible this thread will be a ghost town (no hybrid stuff here, synths...forget it).

However, what could be more epic than the scores to Ben Hur, King of Kings, El Cid, Quo Vadis? As far as orchestral scoring, few could ever hope to aspire to the maestro's heights (but you can both increase your skills and have a lot of fun trying, trust me on this !  ). Then there's the film noir side of his writing, much of which is seriously cool and genre-defining (Killers, Double Indemnity, and the self-homage in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid).

I'm hoping (perhaps in vain) that young composers get a chance to at least give those amazing scores a listen (several of the best have received freaky great rerecordings in recent years). There's so much going on thematically and in terms of orchestration (and not just).

Rózsa also was an ethnomusicologist, having studied at length what we do know about Roman, Jewish, and medieval Spanish music.

In any event, Rozsa is fifth on my list of overall composers (behind only Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, and Bach)...which might give even more reason to check his stuff out.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful 2018!


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## mcalis (Jan 9, 2018)

Thank you for pointing me toward this composer. I think I saw Ben Hur once as a young child, but don't recall much from it. I just searched for Rozsa stuff and, well, first thing I clicked on was his Christmas Sequence (that's what the video is called anyway, not sure if that's also the title of the piece), but wow! It's a fabolous piece so far and I feel like you've just pointed me to a whole new treasure trove of music!

Thank you!


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## Darren Durann (Jan 9, 2018)

Get ready for the overture to Ben Hur...both epic and elegant. Plus the King of Kings prelude...just a TON of cool stuff. You've opened yourself up to some of the best movie music ever!


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## Darren Durann (Jan 9, 2018)

One of the most fascinating things about Rozsa is how he was also a serious Concert composer, his Violin Concerto and Sinfonia Concertante in particular have received a lot of rightly earned praise from musicologists over the years.

If you love melodies that are both beautiful and stick in yer craw for days afterward, allow me to recommend his Violin Concerto's movement 2.


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## Ecliptiq Audio (Jan 9, 2018)

The saddest thing is that he is barely known in Hungary even though he won 3 Oscars. Even I just discovered him a few months ago, and I considered my music knowledge quite extensive (until that point ).


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jan 9, 2018)

Something about time... I forget the name of the film, but his score was on the level of a Bartok violin concerto. Freaking amazing.

I want to say Time After Time? Not the Cindy Lauper song, which is also brilliant (there's also a desert island Miles Davis version of it).


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## Jorgakis (Jan 9, 2018)

The ben hur prelude is one of my favourite soundtrack pieces ever. Don't know why I didn't dig deeper into his work, guess I have to do so.


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## AlexanderSchiborr (Jan 9, 2018)

Very well said here and happy New Year to you and best for 2018.


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## mcalis (Jan 9, 2018)

By the way, this is what I would call musicians helping musicians. It's so easy to get caught up in GAS and inflammatory opinion wars, but then there are the ocasional gems like this where music is shared for the love of it.

On that note, allow me to highly recommend Mykola Leontovych. He is the composer of the famous Christmas Carol that John Williams used for Home Alone (and some other composer before JW turned it into a Christmas Carol to begin with, it's actually a song about a bird announcing the start of spring). I suppose I should create a separate appreciation thread for him, so forgive me the slight tangent!


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## Living Fossil (Jan 9, 2018)

Darren Durann said:


> It's quite possible this thread will be a ghost town (no hybrid stuff here, synths...forget it).



This statement is funny because it's wrong...

Rozsa - whom i really appreciate - indeed what no composer who just looked back in time, but rather was interested in the new possibilities that came with the technical progress.
He used the theremin - the mother of the modern synthesizers - in more than one occasion.
So, he was among the pioneers of "hybrid music".
(Together with Hindemith, etc, etc, etc).

Just as a reminder: also the other 4 composers you mentioned (your order of listing them gives me a serious headache though...  ) all explored "modern" possiblities of sound/composition etc. on many different levels.

They worked on special spatialisation of sound (Mahler), invented new instruments (Wagner, Bach), appreciated new possiblities that came with better instruments (Beethoven; take a look at the horn parts in Fidelio), etc etc.
Loving the tradition doesn't mean to reduce oneself to the options of passed times... It's rather adapting great ideas to the possibities of the present time....


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## AlexanderSchiborr (Jan 9, 2018)

I mean come one..isn´t that great..? All my gizmos go wild when I listen to such music and that performance there..maaan.


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## re-peat (Jan 9, 2018)

Rósza is also the only composer ever who was in the_ running against himself_ for the Oscars: three — _three_, yes — of his scores were nominated in 1945. He won with ‘Spellbound’ (a score which Hitchcock was apparently very unhappy with, didn’t like it at all).

Rósza deserved each and every one of his Oscars, no discussion, but in my opinion, the 1945 one should have gone to Franz Waxman for ‘Objective, Burma!’, one of the greatest collections of pieces of music ever written for a film.)

_


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## Darren Durann (Jan 9, 2018)

re-peat said:


> Rósza is also the only composer ever who was in the_ running against himself_ for the Oscars: three — _three_, yes — of his scores were nominated in 1945. He won with ‘Spellbound’ (a score which Hitchcock was apparently very unhappy with, didn’t like it at all).
> 
> Rósza deserved each and every one of his Oscars, no discussion, but in my opinion, the 1945 one should have gone to Franz Waxman for ‘Objective, Burma!’, one of the greatest collections of pieces of music ever written for a film.)
> 
> _



He also won for Ben Hur (which he richly deserved, as it was the score that most worked as absolute music...and the one he loved most).

Yes @LivingFossil Rozsa did have those sides to his music. I think you know what I meant by hybrid, synths, etc. But your input definitely helps others get a handle on such a magnificent maestro. He, Alfred Newman, Herrmann, Williams, Goldsmith, to a lesser degree Tiomkin and Zimmer...all were simply great composers. Period.


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## tmhuud (Jan 9, 2018)

So heart warming to see so much love for Rozsa here. One my all time favorites is “Knights of the Round Table”. The sheer energy and melodic beauty get me every time.


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## Darren Durann (Jan 9, 2018)

tmhuud said:


> So heart warming to see so much love for Rozsa here. One my all time favorites is “Knights of the Round Table”. The sheer energy and melodic beauty get me every time.



You have really good taste in music!


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## Living Fossil (Jan 9, 2018)

@Darren Durann : yes, of course i know how you meant it, but i just couldn't resist... 
In general, i think it's important to keep in mind that music is most of all about doing the right thing in a specific situation rather than conform to a catalogue of requirements... 
Music can be great because of its complexity but also because of its simplicity.
... i like both...

...and i really like theremins...


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## re-peat (Jan 9, 2018)

Other bit of Rósza trivia: many of the lyrics for the songs he composed during his pre-Hollywood career, were written by the then Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government, Sir Robert Vansittart. (A most interesting man, by the way.) They also collaborated towards the end of 1939 — a time of rapidly increasing unrest and mounting tensions in Europe — which led the French newspaper Le Figaro to publish the following: "We have just learned that the head of the British Foreign Office is working on lyrics for _The Thief of Bagdad _with Miklós Rózsa. As long as the chief diplomatic adviser to the British Government has time to write the lyrics for a film, there is no imminent danger of war." Four weeks later, war was declared.

_


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## CT (Jan 9, 2018)

re-peat said:


> Rósza is also the only composer ever who was in the_ running against himself_ for the Oscars: three — _three_, yes — of his scores were nominated in 1945.
> 
> _



A number of composers have been nominated against themselves over the years, though I'm not sure any others have had three in one year, yes.

Ben-Hur is a masterpiece. The love theme is just too much!


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## Darren Durann (Jan 9, 2018)

Rozsa was a lot like Herrmann in that he really wasn't big into the whole "song" thing. He most often liked more stretched out motifs. In fact, the score to Ben Hur is perhaps the most obvious example of how the Silver and Golden ages of Hollywood film music applied the Wagnerian leitmotif. Only, Rozsa broke from the "mickey mousing" that other seminal film composers like Max Steiner espoused; i.e. he didn't use the motif in a very obvious way all the time (think of cartoon music whenever a villain appears, the clichéd sax during sexy scenes, etc.). Instead he applied them like Wagner did: to situations, emotional post-its, landmarks. A much more broad application.

Living Fossil posted some great stuff up there, and I really liked the concert Ben Hur. I highly recommend folks grabbing the Tadlow music rerecordings of Ben Hur, El Cid, and Sodom and Gomorrah for the most modern performances of his works. S&G is an example of a really bad film with a soundtrack that made it worth watching, while Ben Hur is just a great movie, period (take a big pass on that awful remake).


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## Darren Durann (Jan 9, 2018)

miket said:


> A number of composers have been nominated against themselves over the years, though I'm not sure any others have had three in one year, yes.
> 
> Ben-Hur is a masterpiece. The love theme is just too much!



The Academy is a joke; today Bernard Herrmann is considered in the top five film composers of all time, yet he only won once (All the Money in the World I think), for a score that doesn't come anywhere near Psycho, Vertigo, Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Fahrenheit 451.

The fact that El Cid by Rozsa was passed over is a crying shame. It's brilliant, and holds up just fine as absolute music.

Another great name in film music, Franz Waxman, resigned from heading the Academy for not recognizing one of the most gorgeous scores ever written for screen: Alfred Newman's The Robe.


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## mcalis (Jan 10, 2018)

This is also an interesting listen (part 1 of 3):


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